Quotes by Igor Stravinsky

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

“I have no use for a theoretic freedom. Let me have something finite, definite matter that can lend itself to my operation only insofar as it is commensurate with my possibilities. And such matter ...”

“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 t...”

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

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

“A double bed can seem awfully small if your'e sharing it with someone you don't love." -Misia Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky”

“What force is more potent than love?”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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 be...”

“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 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.”

“Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.”

“Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.”

“Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.”

“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.”