Gyorgy Ligeti

“Yes, fractals are what I want to find in my music.”

“It isn't false modesty when I say this, but although I am supposed to be a famous person it doesn't mean anything to me. I just sit at home and work.”

“Gesualdo was very important to me, I wanted to do something which corresponded to him.”

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

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

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

“Steinberg is great. I should like to meet him.”

“I don't use old music.”

“Well I live in Vienna with my wife and son, and I teach in Hamburg, there will be no changes in that respect.”

“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.”

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

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

“If you come from Paris to Budapest you think you are in Moscow.”

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

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

“I only want to give a metaphysic for my music.”

“For the past ten years I have had no financial problems.”

“New York is the dream world, the center of jazz and rock.”

“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.”

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