Dmitri Shostakovich Quotes

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.

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

You ask if I would have been different without "Party guidance"? Yes, almost certainly. No doubt the line I was pursuing when I wrote the Fourth Symphony would have been stronger and sharper in my work. I would have displayed more brilliance, used more sarcasm, I could have revealed my ideas openly instead of having to resort to camouflage.

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

For some reason, people think that music must tell us only about the pinnacles of the human spirit, or at least about highly romantic villains. Most people are average, neither black nor white. They're gray. A dirty shade of gray. And it's in that vague gray middle ground that the fundamental conflicts of our age take place.

The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.

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.

Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me. I never tire of delighting in it, it's multifaceted, it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It's almost always laughter through tears. This quality of Jewish folk music is close to my ideas of what music should be. There should always be two layers in music. Jews were tormented for so long that they learned to hide their despair. They express despair in dance music.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.