Quotes from Igor Stravinsky

Old age is a time of humiliations, the most disagreeable of which, for me, is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration.

Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?

Art is the opposite of chaos. Art is organized chaos.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

Art postulates communion, and the artist has an imperative need to make others share the joy which he experiences himself.

An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

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

Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?

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.

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.

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

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.

My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

What force is more potent than love?

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?

Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.

Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.

One lives by memory . . . and not by truth.