Top 29 Prokofiev's Quotes
#1. Formalism is music that people don't understand at first hearing.
Sergei Prokofiev
#2. 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
#3. I strenuously object to the very word "grotesque" which has become hackneyed to the point of nausea ... I would prefer my music to be described as "Scherzo-ish" in quality, or else by three words describing the various degrees of the Scherzo - whimsicality, laughter, mockery.
Sergei Prokofiev
#4. While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization,
Margaret Sanger
#5. My tastes went all over the place, from Strauss to Mahler. I was never a big Wagner or Tchaikovsky fan. Benjamin Britten, Tallis, all the early English Medieval music, Prokofiev, some Russian composers, mostly the people that were the colorists, the French.
James Horner
#6. Of course I have used dissonance in my time, but there has been too much dissonance. Bach used dissonance as good salt for his music. Others applied pepper, seasoned the dishes more and more highly, till all healthy appetites were sick and until the music was nothing but pepper.
Sergei Prokofiev
#7. Before I was 5, I did have a lot of time on my hands. I had no job and really no career, and I spent an awful lot of time listening to records. It was more the classical ones, really - Prokofiev, and I think there was some Mozart in there, and more impressionistic composers like Delius.
Wallace Shawn
#8. The art of healing is like an unroofed temple, uncovered at the top and cracked at the foundation.
Benjamin Rush
#9. There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major.
Sergei Prokofiev
#10. My favorite composers are the ones that tell the story. I love Wagner. I love Mahler. Prokofiev. The programmatic music. I listen more to classic rock because I don't like the contemporary music very much.
Patti LuPone
#11. This ferry was taken over by the Yumas and operated for them by a man named Callaghan, but within days it was burned and Callaghan's headless body floated anonymously downriver, a vulture standing between the shoulderblades in clerical black, silent rider to the sea.
Cormac McCarthy
#12. Sir Kenneth MacMillan's version of 'Romeo and Juliet' is my favorite full-length ballet, Sergei Prokofiev's breathtaking score a favorite composition of music. As a student of martial arts, I loved drawing my sword in defense of my Capulet kin.
Sascha Radetsky
#13. The point of advertising is to destroy markets.
Noam Chomsky
#14. The kingmaker. He regained both prestige and fresh mating opportunities.
Frans De Waal
#15. He launched into the color-tsunami of Prokofiev's fourth piano sonata. It soon carried him onto a distant shore where the only thing broken was the silence.
B.V. Lawson
#16. The more value you create for others, the more your life will work. Commit yourself to doing good. To get more from life, you must give more to life.
Robin S. Sharma
#17. The Soviets made me change Romeo and Juliet so that it would have a happy ending, a barbarism, because living people can dance, but the dead cannot dance lying down.
Sergey Prokofiev
#19. Rock and roll is music," said Vanya.
"Prokofiev is music, Stravinski is music, Tchaikovski and Borodin and Rimski-Korsakov and even Rachmaninov, THEY are music. Rock and roll is smart boys with no respect, YOU are rock and roll.
Orson Scott Card
#20. When the Second World War broke out, I felt that everyone must do his share, and I began composing songs and marches for the front. But soon events assumed such gigantic and far-reaching scope as to demand larger canvasses.
Sergei Prokofiev
#21. Beethoven for listening; Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven for playing as well as Bach and Prokofiev and so on. If I kept going, this list would spiral. It's as wide as literature; in fact, it is probably wider.
William Golding
#22. My mother had to explain that one couldnt compose a Liszt rhapsody because it was a piece of music that Liszt himself had composed.
Sergei Prokofiev
#23. was one of those large, under-lit places that seemed to recede into shadow at the periphery, and in the murky middle
Emily St. John Mandel
#24. In 1948 the first severe crash occurred in my life when Stalin put out his decree on 'formalism.' There was a bulletin board in the Moscow Conservatory. They posted the decree, which said Shostakovich's compositions and Prokofiev's were no longer to be played.
Mstislav Rostropovich
#25. All things being equal, attitude wins. All things not being equal, attitude sometimes still wins.
John C. Maxwell
#26. At home we didnt talk about religion. So gradually the question faded away by itself and disappeared from the agenda. When I was nineteen my father died; my response to his death was atheistic.
Sergei Prokofiev
#27. 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
#28. I have never doubted the importance of melody. I like melody very much, and I consider it the most important element in music, and I labour many years on the improvement of its quality in my compositions.
Sergei Prokofiev
#29. I want nothing better, more flexible or more complete than the sonata form, which contains everything necessary for my structural purposes.
Sergei Prokofiev
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