Igor Stravinsky

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

“Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”