Quotes from Dmitri Shostakovich

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

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

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

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.

In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.

A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed.

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

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

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

Football is the ballet of the masses.

Art destroys silence.

I do not wish to listen to people denouncing their parents.

When I hear about someone else's pain, I feel pain too. i feel pain for everything - for people and animals.

Most people are average, neither black nor white, but grey. A dirty shade of grey. To the best of my ability I tried to write about these people, about their completely average, commonplace dreams and hopes, and about their suspicious tendency towards murder.

One must speak the truth about the past or not at all.

It makes you think the best way to hold on to something is to pay no attention to it. The things you love too much must 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.

But I like listening to any music, including bad music. it's a professional disease, an addiction to notes. The brain finds sustenance in any combination of sounds. It works constantly, performing various composerly operations.

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.

Love us when we are dirty, not when we are clean. Anyone will love us when we're clean.

I can think of nothing more horrible than an orchestra that has gone out of control at rehearsal. I wouldn't wish it on an enemy.

Probably many people think that I came back to life after the Fifth Symphony. No. I came back to life after the Seventh.

The majority of my symphonies are tombstones

I'll admit that writing doesn't always come, but I'm totally against walking around looking at the sky when you're experiencing a block, waiting for inspiration to strike you. Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov didn't like each other and agreed on very few things, but they were of one opinion on this: you had to write constantly. If you can't write a major work, write minor trifles. If you can't write at all, orchestrate something.

on Prokofiev] And, by the way, he never did learn how to orchestrate properly.