"New York is the dream world, the center of jazz and rock."

"My grandfather was not a musician but he was an artist - a painter, a decorative painter."

"Then, after the war it was impossible to travel, after so many years of Hitler and Stalin."

"I don't use old music."

"Perhaps the better word is emotional yes, I am an emotional man."

"There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry."

"I continued to study Math and Physics on my own, but one and a half years later I realized that I did want to be a composer, and after that I never changed my mind."

"I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony."

"Stravinsky used Mother Goose. He was influenced by Mother Goose, indirectly, but very beautifully."

"For the past ten years I have had no financial problems."

"First of all I listen to music. I like music."

"I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided."

"In January 1944 I was called up by the Forced Labor Service, but I deserted on October 10, 1944."

"When I was younger I was completely without money - when I was studying in Budapest, when I was a refugee."

"It isn't false modesty when I say this, but although I am supposed to be a famous person it doesn't mean anything to me. I just sit at home and work."

"I only want to give a metaphysic for my music."

"People often thought Leopold Auer was Russian because he lived in St. Petersburg so long, almost fifty years."

"I write bars, for the musicians, because they have to be together."

"I like to stay home and listen to recordings."

"Well I live in Vienna with my wife and son, and I teach in Hamburg, there will be no changes in that respect."

"Yes, fractals are what I want to find in my music."

"I think it was when I was nineteen, by that time the Jewish laws were already in force and the split was beginning to come about which isolated the Jewish culture."

"I listen to all kinds of music - new music, old music, music of my colleagues, everything."

"If you come from Paris to Budapest you think you are in Moscow."

"I don't read such boring things. Life is too short."

"In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity."

"I think a composer is always interested in his last work."

"But if you go from Moscow to Budapest you think you are in Paris."

"Once, in London, the BBC asked me what was my favorite English book. I said Alice in Wonderland."

"But I do not want to use Hungarian verses for British people."