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

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.

For being different, it’s easy. But to be unique, it’s a complicated thing.

It's important to recognize that forgiveness is more than mere words it's a heart attitude that induces a spiritual transformation.

A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother.

Change, if it is to be long lasting, must occur on the unseen levels first

Sister, you're trying to keep me alive as an old curiosity, but I'm done, I'm finished, I'm going to die.

Certainly the interest in asserting copyright is a justified one.

We're like so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us or make us talk.

You cannot cure a lesser evil by a greater evil.

Things will go wrong at times. You can't always control your attitude, approach, and response. You options are to complain or to look ahead and figure out how to make the situation better