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.

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.

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 don't use old music.