During the first six years of my life, Hungary was one of the most important components of the Habsburg dynasty's vast Austro-Hungarian Empire, but after World War I it became an independent national entity.

Everyone says you have to be a specialist, and if you conduct Wagner you cannot conduct Mozart - this is nonsense.

The experience awakened 'my tremendous musical ambition, which has never subsided to this day.

Fight the tendency to become complacent and do one kind of music - that is the death of a musician.

I can only hope that neither of them was scarred by their upbringing.

I would never have become music director of the Chicago Symphony, which would have been an extremely sad loss.

Mozart makes you believe in God because it cannot be by chance that such a phenomenon arrives into this world and leaves such an unbounded number of unparalleled masterpieces.