If it is permissible to write plays that are not intended to be seen, I should like to see who can prevent me from writing a book no one can read.

What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing …

The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secr…

We do not think good metaphors are anything very important, but I think that a good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on...

We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men's minds.

Many people are surprised to hear that we have comedians in Russia, but they are there. They are dead, but they are there.

You ask if I would have been different without 'Party guidance'? Yes, almost certainly. No doubt the line I was pursuing when I wrote the Fourth Symphony would…