Quotes About Expression

So what were people getting so excited about? What was this symphony saying to them? We are still arguing about that a whole human lifetime later. Audiences are still trying to decipher the codes in Shostakovich's symphonies, trying to see under the masks he wore to the true face we expect to find beneath. "It's very difficult to speak through a mask," as the writer Viktor Shklovsky said, but "only a few can play themselves without it.

Titus, I'm afraid of silence.

As musicologist Richard Taruskin has said, "What made Shostakovich's music the secret diary of a nation was not only what he put into it, but what it allowed listeners to draw out.

I'll breathe in whatever face I want to breathe in.

It meant different things to different people, but somehow it meant them all intensely. Shostakovich's words just confuse the issue. His symphony itself is what remains. Listen to it. It is your symphony to write with him.

What is all this? What did we fight for? Why did we shed our blood, if I can't dance to my heart's content — and I'm supposed to be a leader of the new society!

The Fourth Symphony, one of his most fascinating and ingenious works, both brutal and intricate, would go unheard for a quarter of a century, silenced by fear.

As his neighbor Tatyana Litvinova described it, "Nobody who saw him taking his bows on the platform after his music had been performed could forget his crooked figure, his grimace of misery and the fingers that never stopped drumming on his cheek. It was torture just to watch him! He minced his steps and bowed like a circus pony. There was something robot-like in his movements." He didn't need to be nervous.

He was not very fond of music. Not because it didn't move him — but because it did. "It makes me want to say kind things, stupid things, and pat the heads of people," he admitted. "But now you have to beat them on the head, beat them without mercy.

I looked at her, and she was smiling like she was broken.

To become self-aware, people must be allowed to hear a plurality of opinions and then make up their own minds. They must be allowed to say, write and publish whatever they want. Freedom of expression is the most basic, but fundamental, right. Without it, human beings are reduced to automatons.

Don't let me return as a woman in my next life! I'd rather be a dog or a rat than suffer this pain again!

We relished the small freedoms granted to us, but wanted more. We read Ginsberg's Howl, and longed for the day when we too could sing out of our windows in despair.

Ninguna palabra está completa / ni siquiera en alemán que las tiene tan grandes.

Escrevo sem pensar tudo o que meu inconsciente grita. Penso depois: não só para corrigir, mas para justificar o que escrevi.

They do as they please, they say what they think, and nobody cares, for everyone is busy doing likewise.

For a long time I thought I wanted to be a nun. Then I realized that what I really wanted to be was a lesbian.

Find what makes your heart sing and create your own music.

One minute you're bleeding. The next minute you're hemorrhaging. The next minute you're painting the Mona Lisa.

La invención, no la copia de la realidad, es la verdad del arte.

No veo otro camino para que los peluqueros invadieran, como tanto lo han deseado, el oficio de aquéllos (los zapateros), logrando hacer brillar su arte en ambos extremos anatómicos. Por otra parte, el peinado es una manera de pensar por fuera de la cabeza, por lo que debieran sentirse orgullosos los artesanos que tomando la navaja al dejar las tijeras, nos tienen tan acobardados y sitiados como para despojarnos de nuestro cabello sin protesta ni intento de fuga

The best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species.

Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10 000 people.

Sampling is kind of prehistoric, given the technology and the textures you can create.