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.

There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.

I don't use old music.

I think a composer is always interested in his last work.

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

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

Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot simply go back to tonality, it’s not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.