Igor Stravinsky

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it.

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.

Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.

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.

A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.

Music must be listened to; it is not enough to hear it. A duck hears also.

I knew I had to write a Mass of my own, but a real one.

Music is...the coordination between man and time.

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.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

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

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

The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.

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.

What force is more potent than love?

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.

Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.

One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.

We have a duty towards music, namely, to invent it.

All music is nothing more than a succession of impulses that converge towards a definite point of repose.