Top 50 Dmitri Shostakovich Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Dmitri Shostakovich

2. “Music is a means capable of expressing dark dramatism and pure rapture, suffering and ecstasy, fiery and cold fury, melancholy and wild merriment – and the subtlest nuances and interplay of these feelings which words are powerless to express and which are unattainable in painting and sculpture.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

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

— Dmitri Shostakovich

4. “A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

5. “Football is the ballet of the masses.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

6. “Those who have ears to hear, will hear.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

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

— Dmitri Shostakovich

8. “The best way to hold on to something is to pay no attention to it. The things you love too much 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.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

9. “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.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

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

— Dmitri Shostakovich

11. “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.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

12. “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.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

13. “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.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

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

— Dmitri Shostakovich

15. “So many unsaid things collect in the soul, so much exhaustion and irritation lie as a heavy burden on the psyche. And you must, you must unburden your spiritual world or risk a collapse. Sometimes you feel like screaming, but you control yourself and just babble some nonsense.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

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

— Dmitri Shostakovich

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

— Dmitri Shostakovich

18. “Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

19. “Stravinsky the composer I worship. Stravinsky the thinker I despise.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

20. “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.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

21. “The Seventh Symphony had been planned before the war and consequently, it simply cannot be seen as a reaction to Hitler’s attack. The ‘invasion theme’ has nothing to do with the attack. I was thinking of other enemies of humanity when I composed the team.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

22. “The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

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

— Dmitri Shostakovich

24. “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

25. “A great piece of music is beautiful, regardless of how it is performed.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

26. “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

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. “Really, we musicians do like to talk about Mussorgsky. In fact, I think that it’s the second most favourite topic after Tchaikovsky’s love life.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

29. “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

30. “Tragedies in hindsight look like farces. When you describe your fear to someone else, it seems ridiculous. That’s human nature.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

31. “Love us when we are dirty, not when we are clean. Anyone will love us when we’re clean.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

32. “It’s about the people, who have stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

33. “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

34. “I hate Toscanini. I’ve never heard him in a concert hall, but I’ve heard enough of his recordings. What he does to music is terrible in my opinion. He chops it up into a hash and then pours a disgusting sauce over it. Toscanin ‘honoured’ me by conducting my symphonies. I heard those recordings, too, and they’re worthless.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

35. “When I hear about someone else’s pain, I feel pain too. i feel pain for everything – for people and animals.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

36. “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

37. “The majority of my symphonies are tombstones. Too many of our people died and were buried in places unknown to anyone, not even their relatives. It happened to many of my friends. Where do you put the tombstones for Meyerhold or Tukhachevsky? Only music can do that for them. Looking back, I see nothing but ruins, only mountains of corpses... I’m not exaggerating, I mean mountains... I’m sad, I’m grieving all the time.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

38. “What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? Doesn’t laughter also have a claim to that lofty title? I want to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in serious music.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

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

— Dmitri Shostakovich

40. “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

41. “The Seventh and Eighth symphonies are my requiem.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

46. “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

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

— Dmitri Shostakovich

48. “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

49. “Our family discussed the Revolution of 1905 constantly. I was born after that, but the stories deeply affected my imagination. When I was older, I read much about how it all had happened. It think that it was a turning point – the people stopped believing in the tsar. The Russian people are always like that – they believe and they believe and then suddenly it comes to an end. And the ones the people no longer believe in come to a bad end.”

— Dmitri Shostakovich

50. “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