Music is good, not evil. Poetry is good, not evil. Primitive, but oh, so true!
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICHI 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.
More Dmitri Shostakovich Quotes
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Stravinsky the composer I worship. Stravinsky the thinker I despise.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed.
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 -
Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.
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 -
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.
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 -
What you have in your head, put down on paper. The head is a fragile vessel.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.
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 -
When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
If they cut off both hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth.
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 -
In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
He fell like a chicken into the soup.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH






