Igor Stravinsky Quotes
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To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.
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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.
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Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.
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A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
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My music is best understood by children and animals.
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What force is more potent than love?
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In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?
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Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?
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The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.
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Music's exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it.
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Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
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Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa-Lobos?
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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.
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Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.
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Composers combine notes, that's all.
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Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it.
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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.
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What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.
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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.
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I am an inventor of music.
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I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.
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Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.
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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.
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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.