Dmitri Shostakovich Short Quotes

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When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.

Dmitri Shostakovich
What you have in your head, put down on paper. The head is a fragile vessel.

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.

Dmitri Shostakovich
The real geniuses know where their writing has to be good and where they can get away with some mediocrity.

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

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 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
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
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.

Dmitri Shostakovich
What do you think of Puccini?
[Britten: "I think his operas are dreadful."]
No, Ben, you are wrong. He wrote marvellous operas, but dreadful music.

Dmitri Shostakovich
The Allies enjoyed my music, as though trying to say: Look how we like Shostakovich's symphonies, and you still want something more from us, a second front or something.

Dmitri Shostakovich
A creative artist works on his next composition because he is not satisfied with his previous one. When he loses a critical attitude toward his own work, he ceases to be an artist.

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