Igor Stravinsky Quotes

I've always been accused of moving around too much when I play concertos. Sometimes, conductors ask me which of us is leading.

I have to go with what the painting says to me. The painting is always informing me. I'm its servant; it's not mine. I'm doing what it wants.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd.

In art, theories are as useful as a doctor's prescription; one must be sick to believe them.

An artist cannot be responsible for what people make of their art. An audience loathe giving up preconceived images of an artist.

My own position is, that it is largely up to the work itself to suggest the nature of these referential points without dimensions in and through the processes by which the distance between them is maintained.

As an artist, I can't be responsible for how people interpret material.

The art of interpretation is not to play what is written.

Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That's the thing about painting, photography, cinema.

When we make the show, we are always talking about how the show is really in between what we make and what the viewer thinks of it.

I can't be enthusiastic as soon as I write something on the music sheet. The music sheet is only the beginning: it has to be listened to, played by the instruments, and then heard by the director, but most importantly, it has to be listened to by the public.

When you make a piece, one of the interesting things is hearing what other people think about it.

Directing is an act of interpretation.

When you write a script, you hope that people will give it life beyond the script.

Style is objective, akin to art, so it varies.

Writing is a creative art form and the acting and directing is more of an interpretive art form.

The whole duty of a conductor is comprised in his ability to indicate the right tempo.

There is no adequate definition for creative writing, any more than it is possible to describe pain or flavor or color.

Without an elite in the arts, we have no leaders, which is to say we have no vision, which is to say we have no arts.

Being a creative person. It's so much more rewarding when you find things on your own, to live whatever the writers are writing or to display what the director is looking for. You are the thing that everybody uses to get the story out.

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

My films are misinterpreted all the time. I don't mind that. Everybody's films are misinterpreted. But there's no malice or stupidity in the people that misinterpret them. You know what you do, but someone else sees it, and they want to talk about it or write about it, and so they misinterpret them.

It's always funny to me how your movie becomes no longer yours and people interpret it how they want and react how they want to react to it, and it's fun to kind of watch that happen.

A conductor should reconcile himself to the realization that regardless of his approach or temperament the eventual result is the same-the orchestra will hate him.