Dmitri Shostakovich Quotes

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

  Dmitri Shostakovich

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• “Football is the ballet of the masses.”

  Dmitri Shostakovich

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• “Art destroys silence.”

  Dmitri Shostakovich

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• “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.”

  Dmitri Shostakovich

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• “I do not wish to listen to people denouncing their parents.”

  Dmitri Shostakovich

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

  Dmitri Shostakovich

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• “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.”

  Dmitri Shostakovich

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• “In response to a plea in early 1941 from his colleague and friend, the writer Marietta Shaginyan, who was newly infatuated with the Piano Quintet and its creator, Mickhail Zoshchenko drafted for her a portrait of the Shostakovich he knew, a deeply complex individual:
  "It seemed to you that he is “frail, fragile, withdrawn, an infinitely direct, pure child.” That is so. But if it were only so, then great art (as with him) would never be obtained. He is exactly what you say he is, plus something else — he is hard, acid, extremely intelligent, strong perhaps, despotic and not altogether good-natured (although cerebrally good-natured).
  
  That is the combination in which he must be seen. And then it may be possible to understand his art to some degree.
  
  In him, there are great contradictions. In him, one quality obliterates the other. It is conflict in the highest degree. It is almost a catastrophe."
  
  Quoted in Laurel Fay: Shostakovich, a Life.”

  Dmitri Shostakovich

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• “The majority of my symphonies are tombstones”

  Dmitri Shostakovich

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• “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.”

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• “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.”

  Dmitri Shostakovich

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

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

  Dmitri Shostakovich

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• “I'm training my left hand to write, in case I lose the ability in my right. That's gymnastics for the dying.”

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

  Dmitri Shostakovich

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• “A fresh approach to a work of music (...) usually comes to those who have a fresh approach to aspects of life, to life in general.”

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• “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.”

  Dmitri Shostakovich

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• “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.”

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• “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

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• “Of course they understood, they understood what was happening around them and they understood what the Fifth [Symphony] was about.”

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• “The truth is that the war helped. The war brought great sorrow and made life very very hard. Much sorrow, many tears. But it had been even harder before the war, because then everyone was alone in his sorrow.”

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• “I do write quickly, that's true, but I think about my music for a comparatively long time, and until it's complete in my head I don't begin setting it down.”

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• “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.”

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• “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.”

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• “What galls me is that these sadists always have fans and followers-- and sincere ones at that. The typical example of this is Toscanini.”

  Dmitri Shostakovich

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