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

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.

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 think a composer is always interested in his last work.

Perhaps the better word is emotional yes, I am an emotional man

Stravinsky used Mother Goose. He was influenced by Mother Goose, indirectly, but very beautifully

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