Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. He is widely acknowledged as one of the most important and influential composers of 20th century music.
He was a quintessentially cosmopolitan Russian who was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the century. He became a naturalized US citizen in 1946. In addition to the recognition he received for his compositions, he also achieved fame as a pianist and a conductor, often at the premieres of his works.
He also published a number of books throughout his career, almost always with the aid of a collaborator, sometimes uncredited. In his 1936 autobiography, Chronicles of My Life, written with the help of Walter Nouvel, Stravinsky included his infamous statement that "music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all."
“The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.”
“Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.”
“One lives by memory . . . and not by truth.”
“my childhood was a peroid of waiting to the moment when i could send everyone in it to hell.”
“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 in one path is to go backward.”
“I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.”
“To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.”
“In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?”
“Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.”