Dmitri Shostakovich Quotes

#1. Torture is a good way to get people to talk but a poor method of finding out the truth; people confess whether there is any reality to the confession or not.

-Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

M T Anderson

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

Dmitri Shostakovich

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. Real music is always revolutionary, for it cements the ranks of the people; it arouses them and leads them onward.

Dmitri Shostakovich

#6. 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

#7. A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one.

Dmitri Shostakovich

#8. Every piece of music is a form of personal expression for its creator ... If a work doesnt express the composers own personal point of view, his own ideas, then it doesnt, in my opinion, even deserve to be born.

Dmitri Shostakovich

#9. 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

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

Dmitri Shostakovich

#11. Badgering a colleague doesn't come from a fit of pique, it comes from an organic quality of the soul. And a mean soul will inevitably be reflected in music. Wagner is a convincing example of that, but far from the only one.

Dmitri Shostakovich

#12. If they cut off both hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth.

Dmitri Shostakovich

#13. Stravinsky is one of the greatest composers of our time and I truly love many of his works. ( ... ) The marvellous composer has invariably been at the centre of my attention, and I not only studied and listened to his music, but I played it and made my own transcriptions as well.

Dmitri Shostakovich

#14. 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

#15. I don't think that Prokofiev ever treated me seriously as a composer; he considered only Stravinsky a rival and never missed a chance to take a shot at him. I remember once he started telling me some vile story about Stravinsky. I cut him off.

Dmitri Shostakovich

#16. Football is the ballet of the masses.

Dmitri Shostakovich

#17. 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

#18. Those who have ears to hear, will hear

Dmitri Shostakovich

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

Dmitri Shostakovich

#20. The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.

Dmitri Shostakovich

#21. A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That's how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.

Dmitri Shostakovich

#22. Art destroys silence.

Dmitri Shostakovich

#23. It's about the people, who have stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over.

Dmitri Shostakovich

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. Studying Mahler changed many things in my tastes as a composer. Mahler & Berg are my favourite composers even today, as opposed to Hindemith, say, a Krenek and Milhaud whom I liked when I was young but cooled towards rapidly.

Dmitri Shostakovich

#27. Now I can't abide rudeness, even in so called great artists. Rudeness and cruelty are the qualities i hate most. Rudeness and cruelty are always connected, I feel. One example out of many is Stalin.

Dmitri Shostakovich

#28. Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.

Dmitri Shostakovich

#29. Music is good, not evil. Poetry is good, not evil. Primitive, but oh, so true!

Dmitri Shostakovich

#30. Stravinsky the composer I worship. Stravinsky the thinker I despise.

Dmitri Shostakovich

#31. 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

#32. This quality of Jewish folk music [- it can appear to be happy when it's tragic-] is close to my idea of what music should be. The should always be two layers in music.

Dmitri Shostakovich

#33. Prokofiev and I never did become friends, probably because Prokofiev was not inclined towards friendly relations in general. He was a hard man and didn't seem interested in anything than himself and his music.

Dmitri Shostakovich