Dmitri Shostakovich Quotes

When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.

Real music is always revolutionary, for it cements the ranks of the people; it arouses them and leads them onward.

If they cut off both hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth.

I write music, it’s performed. After all, my music says it all. It doesn’t need historical and hysterical commentaries. In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.

A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one.

In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.

What you have in your head, put down on paper. The head is a fragile vessel.

I feel eternal pain for those who were killed by Hitler, but I feel no less pain for those killed on Stalin's orders. I suffer for everyone who was tortured, shot, or starved to death.

The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue.

It's about the people, who have stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over.

A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed.

Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.

Stravinsky the composer I worship. Stravinsky the thinker I despise.

The real geniuses know where their writing has to be good and where they can get away with some mediocrity.

People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtushenko's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence.

Football is the ballet of the masses.

I don't know what will become of this piece. Our brave critics will no doubt charge me with imitating Ravel's Bolero. Too bad - this is how I hear war.

The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.

I always try to make myself as widely understood as possible; and if I don't succeed, I consider it my own fault.

He fell like a chicken into the soup.

Music is good, not evil. Poetry is good, not evil. Primitive, but oh, so true!

Those who have ears to hear, will hear

I live in the USSR, work actively and count naturally on the worker and peasant spectator. If I am not comprehensible to them I should be deported.

Some love is so powerful after all, that it must always include sadness, because encrypted within it is the knowledge that someday it will come to an end.