Dmitri Shostakovich

"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."

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

"I always try to make myself as widely understood as possible, and if I dont succeed I consider its my own fault."

"A creative artist works on his next composition because he is not satisfied with his previous one. When he loses a critical attitude toward his own work, he ceases to be an artist."

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

"He did not write about this war and that revolution, but about war and revolution in general, the state of mind and emotion, not facts."