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Quotes by Igor Stravinsky

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 the negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monkey. 'That's different. For a monkey, it's terrific.'
– 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
My music is best understood by children and animals.
– Igor Stravinsky
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.
– 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
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
Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
– Igor Stravinsky
Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?
– Igor Stravinsky
I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt 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
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
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