Igor Stravinsky

My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

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

One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.

Vivaldi didn't write 400 concertos; he wrote one concerto 400 times.

For I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality.

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

Hurry? I have no time to hurry.

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

My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.

I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.

I'm interested in everything in life except music.

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.

My music is cheap. It's my name that is expensive.

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading.

To continue on one path is to go backward.

He was a six and a half foot scowl.

What is modern music anyway? I don't care a damn about so-called modern music. You ask whether my style is modern. My style is my style, that's all…

A cultural snob is someone who claims to be familiar with the incomprehensible.

Never look at the trombones. You'll only encourage them.