Gyorgy Ligeti

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

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

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

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

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

“Gesualdo was very important to me, I wanted to do something which corresponded to him.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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 don't use old music.”

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

“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 ha...”

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