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 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.

I write bars, for the musicians, because they have to be together.

Then, after the war it was impossible to travel, after so many years of Hitler and Stalin.

People often thought Leopold Auer was Russian because he lived in St. Petersburg so long, almost fifty years.

I don't use old music.

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