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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.