Although both sides of my family were religious, I was never forced to practice the Jewish faith. I did not really rebel against it, but then, as today, I disliked organized religion. I have a strange inhibition about praying with others.

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

After about six months, I told my mother that I wanted the lessons to stop, and she was intelligent enough not to force me to continue. Besides, the lessons cost money, which was anything but abundant in our household.

Between the two men, somewhere, a truth is lying, and that is what I try to find.

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.

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

From Toscanini I learnt the essential and desperate seriousness of making music.