A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICHI 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.
More Dmitri Shostakovich Quotes
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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 -
In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.
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 -
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 -
If they cut off both hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
What you have in your head, put down on paper. The head is a fragile vessel.
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 -
Football is the ballet of the masses.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
Music is good, not evil. Poetry is good, not evil. Primitive, but oh, so true!
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
Real music is always revolutionary, for it cements the ranks of the people; it arouses them and leads them onward.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
He fell like a chicken into the soup.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH