When I was younger I was completely without money - when I was studying in Budapest, when I was a refugee

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

I only want to give a metaphysic for my music.

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.

I continued to study Math and Physics on my own, but one and a half years later I realized that I did want to be a composer, and after that I never changed my mind.

In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity

I lived under the Nazis and under the Communists.