DSCHentennial

"Tomorrow is my sixty-second birthday. At such an age, people are apt to reply coquettishly to questions such as 'If you could be born over again, would you live your sixty-two years in the same way?' 'Yes,' they say, 'not everything was perfect of course, there were some disappointments, but on the whole I would do much the same again.'

"If I were ever to be asked this question, my reply would be: 'No! A thousand times no!'"

--Dmitri Shostakovich in a letter to Isaak Glikman, September 24, 1968.


Shostakovich, born September 25, 1906; died August 9, 1975.