Igor Stravinsky

I am a very curious man. I always want to learn new things.

I am a very stubborn man. I never give up.

I have never understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

I am in the present.

Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all.

I have a predilection for composing in bedrooms.

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self.

I don't write modern music. I write good music.

The principle of the octave is the principle of repetition.

He [Rachmaninov] was a six and a half foot scowl.

I never am sea sick, never. I am sea drunk!

I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya.

Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa Lobos?

An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.

I was not especially friendly with Rachmaninov at the time, nor, I think, was any one else: social relations with a man of Rachmaninov's temperament require more perseverance than I can afford: he was merely bringing me honey.

[Charles Ives] was exploring the 1960s during the heyday of Strauss and Debussy. Polytonality; atonality; tone clusters; perspectivistic effects; chance; statistical composition; permutation; add-a-part, practical-joke, and improvisatory music: these were Ives' discoveries a half-century ago as he quietly set about devouring the contemporary cake before the rest of us even found a seat at the same table.

We can neither put back the clock nor slow down our forward speed, and as we are already flying pilotless, on instrument controls, it is even too late to ask where we are going.

Conformism is so hot on the heels of the mass-produced avant-garde that the 'ins' and the 'outs' change places with the speed of mach 3.

The one true comment on a piece of music is another piece of music.

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