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