A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one.
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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A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
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.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
The best way to hold on to something is to pay no attention to it. The things you love too much perish. You have to treat everything with irony, especially the things you hold dear. There’s more of a chance then that they’ll survive.
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 -
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 -
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 -
I always try to make myself as widely understood as possible; and if I don’t succeed, I consider it my own fault.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
What you have in your head, put down on paper. The head is a fragile vessel.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
Football is the ballet of the masses.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? Doesn’t laughter also have a claim to that lofty title? I want to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in “serious” music.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
Music is good, not evil. Poetry is good, not evil. Primitive, but oh, so true!
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.
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