Igor Stravinsky Quotes

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before. I'm still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that's really the thing that I work on when I make records with people.

Blake is damned good to steal from.

I don't get my inspiration from a specific source. It's more like if you listen to a good tune, it gives me inspiration to write a better tune.

Music. It's all creativity right here, right now.

People ask what was the first piece of music I wrote. There was no first piece.

Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.

Any good music must be an innovation.

Music is all about creativity.

A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.

There's nothing like the eureka moment of knocking off a song that didn't exist before - I won't compare it to sex, but it lasts longer.

Authors from whom others steal should not complain, but rejoice. Where there is no game there are no poachers.

I love originating shows and originating songs - there is nothing better than being the first one to get to do a song.

We all do 'do, re, mi,' but you have got to find the other notes yourself.

That's what I find with any good song, you just have to let it happen. Out of about twenty songs you might write, one of any significance. It might be thirty or forty, but I just keep churning them out and churning them out in hope that one of them will stick.

When you're playing such brilliant music every day, then the last thing you ever want to do is try to write something of your own that's crude and not as good.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

You're creating new things in movies and people are going to steal them.

I think its so cool that you can pick up the guitar and create something that didn't exist 5 minutes ago. You can write something that no ones ever heard before. You have music at your fingertips.

I felt Michael Jackson was inspired a little bit more from the elegance of a Fred Astaire. Michael loved Sammy Davis, Jr. and James Brown and Judy Garland and Fred Astaire. But he wasn't any of those people. To be inspired is one thing, but he made it all his own.

I wrote music. I was in a hardcore band when I was 14, and I wasn't good enough to play anyone else's songs, so I had to write my own.

The Beatles never sounded intimidated by their idols. They never interpreted old rock; they simply played it as well and as joyfully as they knew how. On 'Rock 'n' Roll,' John Lennon does nothing but interpret old rock.

The day I run out of ideas is the day I stop making records.

When you tune your guitar in a different way, it lends itself to a new way of looking at your songwriting.

It's fun and super exciting to see how other people work, how other people write music, and how other people put things together. To me, it's an endless learning process, and I love doing it because everybody works so completely differently.

I think you can't repeat beats. If you're doing something in one book, you can't do the exact same thing in another book.