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. 

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

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. 

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

I am an inventor of music. 

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. 

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

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. 

In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love? 

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

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

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal. 

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

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