Igor Stravinsky Quotes

If everything was planned, it would be dreadful. If everything was unplanned, it would be equally dreadful.

I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable.

I guess, like, the whole thing with music is - you're a little bit in control but not fully in control. Which is kind of the fun of it.

In using chance operations, the mind is enriched.

I want a very ordered image, but I want it to come about by chance.

Making plans is a game. Life chooses for you.

Chance never writ a legible book; chance never built a fair house; chance never drew a neat picture; it never did any of these things, nor ever will; nor can it be without absurdity supposed able to do them; which yet are works very gross and rude, very easy and feasible, as it were, in comparison to the production of a flower or a tree.

These things do not happen by chance. There is much less luck in public affairs than some suppose.

Only the element of chance is needed to make war a gamble, and that element is never absent.

A director is someone who presides over a series of accidents.

The great challenge is how to marry creativity with discipline so that discipline amplifies creativity without destroying it.

Chance... in the accommodation peculiar to sensorimotor intelligence, plays the same role as in scientific discovery. It is only useful to the genius and its revelations remain meaningless to the unskilled.

All inquires carry with them some element of risk. There is no guarantee that the universe will conform to our predispositions.

Play is experimenting with chance.

Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.

If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.

If you're lucky, you don't think in a straight line.

The most amazing combinations can result if you shuffle the pack enough.

I have yet to be in a game where luck was involved.

A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction.

Chance is the only source of true novelty.

The beauty of my profession [architecture] lies in its randomness and surprise. And don't think I can choose my projects. I have to build what's offered to me.

You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

Necessity and chance Approach not me, and what I will is fate.

That which takes effect by chance is not an art.