Quotes from Igor Stravinsky

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

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

To continue in one path is to go backward.

my childhood was a peroid of waiting to the moment when i could send everyone in it to hell.

Recordings of Georgian folk polyphonic songs makes a great musical impression. They are recorded in a tradition of active reproduction of Georgian folk music the origin of which begins from ancient time. It is a wonderful finding and can give to the performance much more than all the modem music can... Yodel or "Krimanchuli" as it is called in Georgia is the best song which I have ever heard. ["America" magazine, No 23 1967]

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

He was a six and a half foot scowl. (on Rachmaninov)

Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament.

I live neither in the past nor in the future. 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.

The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.

There is no beauty in Music itself, the beauty is within the listener

Georgian folk music has more new musical ideas than all the contemporary music. [Los Angeles Times. 26.02.1990]

I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.

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.

I love ballet and am more interested in it than in anything else. . . . For the only form of scenic art that sets itself, as its cornerstone, the tasks of beauty, and nothing else, is ballet.

The phenomenon of music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the co-ordination between man [sic] and time." Igor Stravinsky, quoted in DeLone et. al. (Eds.) (1975). Aspects of Twentieth-Century Music. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0130493465, Ch. 3. from Igor Stravinsky' Autobiography (1962). New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., p. 54.

The perfection of performance has escalated to the extent that the music itself is threatened with relegation.

The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free.

Those times have given way to a new age that seeks to reduce everything to uniformity in the realm of matter while it tends to shatter all universality in the realm of the spirit in deference to an anarchic individualism.

Your distress about life might mean you have been living for the wrong reason, not that you have no reason for living.

I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God

Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one

I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain abstract painting, and answered in hte negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monk.