Igor Stravinsky – 10 Quotes

10 Quotes by Igor Stravinsky

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

– Igor Stravinsky

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

– Igor Stravinsky

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.

– Igor Stravinsky

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.

– Igor Stravinsky

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

– Igor Stravinsky

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.

– Igor Stravinsky

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead.

– Igor Stravinsky

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.

– 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.

– Igor Stravinsky

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.

– Igor Stravinsky