1. Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.

2. People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

3. The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life’s major mysteries.

Before becoming a star in American films, she had already been a leading actress in Swedish, French, German, Italian, and British films. Her first introduction to American audiences came with her starring role in the English remake of Intermezzo in 1939. In America, she brought to the screen a “Nordic freshness and vitality,” along with extreme beauty and intelligence, and, according to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, quickly became “the ideal of American womanhood” and one of Hollywood’s greatest leading actresses.

Her producer David O. Selznick, who called her “the most completely conscientious actress” he had ever worked with, gave her a seven-year acting contract, thereby assuring her continual stardom. A few of her other starring roles besides Casablanca included the films For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), Gaslight (1944), The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), and Under Capricorn (1949), and the independent production, Joan of Arc (1948).

1. I have no regrets. I wouldn’t have lived my life the way I did if I was going to worry about what people were going to say.

2. Time is shortening. But every day that I challenge this cancer and survive is a victory for me.

3. Cancer victims who don’t accept their fate, who don’t learn to live with it, will only destroy what little time they have left.

4. Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get.

Stravinsky’s compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (Russian Ballets): The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911/1947), and The Rite of Spring (1913). The Rite, whose premiere provoked a riot, transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure, and was largely responsible for Stravinsky’s enduring reputation as a musical revolutionary, pushing the boundaries of musical design.

After this first Russian phase Stravinsky turned to neoclassicism in the 1920s. The works from this period tended to make use of traditional musical forms (concerto grosso, fugue, symphony), frequently concealed a vein of intense emotion beneath a surface appearance of detachment or austerity, and often paid tribute to the music of earlier masters, for example J. S. Bach and Tchaikovsky.

In the 1950s he adopted serial procedures, using the new techniques over his last twenty years. Stravinsky’s compositions of this period share traits with all of his earlier output: rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a few two- or three-note cells, and clarity of form, of instrumentation, and of utterance.

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.” With Alexis Roland-Manuel and Pierre Souvtchinsky he wrote his 1939–40 Harvard University Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, which were delivered in French and later collected under the title Poétique musicale in 1942 (translated in 1947 as Poetics of Music). Several interviews in which the composer spoke to Robert Craft were published as Conversations with Igor Stravinsky. They collaborated on five further volumes over the following decade.

Stravinsky signed a full agreement with Boosey & Hawkes for his musical copyrights in 1947.

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More Quotes

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