Quotes from Gyorgy Ligeti

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I only want to give a metaphysic for my music.

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

I lived under the Nazis and under the Communists.

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

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

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

First of all I listen to music. I like music.

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

There was a very famous musician in our family. He was a great violinist, an internationally known teacher. He was Leopold Auer.

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

Once, in London, the BBC asked me what was my favorite English book. I said Alice in Wonderland.

I like to stay home and listen to recordings.

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

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

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

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.