I always try to make myself as widely understood as possible; and if I don’t succeed, I consider it my own fault.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICHThe 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.
More Dmitri Shostakovich Quotes
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Football is the ballet of the masses.
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Stravinsky the composer I worship. Stravinsky the thinker I despise.
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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.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
Real music is always revolutionary, for it cements the ranks of the people; it arouses them and leads them onward.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
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.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
Every piece of music is a form of personal expression for its creator. If a work doesn’t express the composers own personal point of view, his own ideas, then it doesn’t, in my opinion, even deserve to be born.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
He fell like a chicken into the soup.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
If they cut off both hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
It’s about the people, who have stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over.
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In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.
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The real geniuses know where their writing has to be good and where they can get away with some mediocrity.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
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.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH






