Dmitri Shostakovich Quotes - Page 2

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• 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

  Trying, Succeed, Faults

  New York Times, February 9, 1942.

  16 Copy quote

• He fell like a chicken into the soup.

  Dmitri Shostakovich

  Soup, Chickens

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  Childhood, Biographies, Prelude

  29 Copy quote

• 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

  Should, Peasants, Workers

  "Shostakovich: A Life". Book by Laurel Fay, p. 55, 2000.

  7 Copy quote

• I don't think that either self-deprecation or self-aggrandizement is among the defining qualities of an artist... Beethoven could have been forgiven if his symphonies had gone to his head. Gretchaninoff could also be forgiven if his Dobrinya Nikititch went to his head. But neither one could be forgiven for writing a piece that was amoral, servile, the work of a flunky.

  Dmitri Shostakovich

  Writing, Artist, Thinking

  "Composers on Music". Book edited by Josiah Fisk and Jeff Nichols, p. 354, letter to Isaac Glikman (February 26, 1960), 1997.

  29 Copy quote

• 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

  War, Brave, Doubt

  17 Copy quote

• Many consider that Shostakovich is the greatest 20th-century composer. In his 15 symphonies, 15 quartets, and in other works he demonstrated mastery of the largest and most challenging forms with music of great emotional power and technical invention...All his works are marked by emotional extremes - tragic intensity, grotesque and bizarre wit, humour, parody, and savage sarcasm.

  Dmitri Shostakovich

  Sarcasm, Emotional, Symphony

  11 Copy quote

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