Igor Stravinsky

I come to Italy [1935] not only to make music, but also to be in a country that is moving forward vigorously, that affirms itself ever more rigorously, in which one sees everywhere the imprint, and one senses the will of an intelligent and powerful regime. I became a French citizen, but spiritually I am also a fascist, above all a fascist.

We in Russia have our Trotskys, and I myself should be highly annoyed if anyone were to take them for authentic Russians.

I was attacked for being a pasticheur, chided for composing “simple” music, blamed for deserting “modernism,” accused of renouncing my “true Russian heritage.” People who had never heard of, or cared about, the originals cried “sacrilege”: “The classics are ours. Leave the classics alone.” To them all my answer was and is the same: You “respect,” but I love.

If a work is not finished by me before I begin to compose it, then I experience the deepest torment.

My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.

All you have to do is close your eyes and wait for the symbols.

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.

That is why I compulsively let myself be carried away by external commitments.

Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.

Georgian folk music has more new musical ideas than all the contemporary music.

Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.

What I cannot follow are the manic-depressive fluctuations from total control to no control, from the serialization of all elements to chance.

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.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

To listen is an effort, and a creative effort. The listener now becomes a performer.

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.

My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles.

I am not a musician. I am a composer.

Beauty is certainly a thing that exists, but it has no absolute value.