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

I don't read such boring things. Life is too short.

However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.

I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.

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.

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

I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony.