The academy gave me a grounding in discipline and hard work that has sustained me throughout my life, and the lessons I learned there I now try to impress on young people.

Friends are very important to me, and I have always had many of them. There are probably many reasons why this is so, but two seem to me more valid than any of the others I am a naturally friendly person, and I hate to be alone.

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.

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.

My entire learning process is slow, because I have no visual memory.

The joy of working with the Chicago Symphony was immeasureable.