"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 don't succeed I consider it's my own fault."

"A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at …"

"I live in the USSR, work actively and count naturally on the worker and peasant spectator. If I am not comprehensible…"

"There can be no music without ideology. The old composers, whether they knew it or not, were upholding a political th…"

"I don't think that either self-deprecation or self-aggrandizement is among the defining qualities of an artist…Beetho…"

"Music is a means capable of expressing dark dramatism and pure rapture, suffering and ecstasy, fiery and cold fury, m…"

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

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

"What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? Doesn't laughter also have a claim…"