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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.

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 only want to give a metaphysic for my music.

You have to be afraid of failure. You have to be terrified

Life can be real tough ... you can either learn from your problems or keep repeating them over and over.

I like to think that the Internet and file sharing, if utilized properly and embraced, and I emphasize properly, is a high-powered marketing design.

I want to inspire people to change the world. That's something that I feel that I'm meant to do here... really going to change the world. I asked God to make me immortal so I can do it.

Art is difficult. Its not entertainment.

What am I going to do with you? I have suggestions, but this might not be the place for them.

If you're a social democrat, then you think it's cool to pay taxes. For me, tax is the finest expression for what politics really is.

I think the University of Texas has the chance to become the finest public university in the country.

Life is not something to be lived through: it is something to be lived up to. It is a privilege, not a penal servitude of so many decades on earth.