Quotes from Igor Stravinsky

Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor we do not remember him in it.

Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge.

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.

Look for the music on all things, and life will be a symphony of joy. My music is best understood by children and animals.

Music's exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it.

Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.

Music is...the coordination between man and time.

The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.

Hurry? I have no time to hurry.

The further one separates himself from the precepts of the Christian Church, the further one distances himself from the truth. Only God can create. I make music from music.

I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.

I am an inventor of music.

I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity.

A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.

Childhood - a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.

Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.

I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the varieties of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.

Music is given to us specifically to make order of things, to move from an anarchic, individualistic state to a regulated, perfectly concious one, which alone insures vitality and durability.

I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve.

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.

The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending.

It is one of nature's ways that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.