Igor Stravinsky Quotations | Page 2

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

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'.

To be deprived of art and left alone with philosophy is to be close to Hell.

Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge.

The past slips from our grasp. It leaves us only scattered things. The bond that united them eludes us. Our imagination usually fills in the void by making use of preconceived theories...Archaeology, then, does not supply us with certitudes, but rather with vague hypotheses. And in the shade of these hypotheses some artists are content to dream, considering them less as scientific facts than as sources of inspiration.

Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.

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.

Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.

What force is more potent than love?

To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.