Best 26 quotes of Gyorgy Ligeti on MyQuotes

But I do not want to use Hungarian verses for British people.

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

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

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

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.

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

I don't use old music.

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

I listen to all kinds of music - new music, old music, music of my colleagues, everything.

I lived under the Nazis and under the Communists.

In January 1944 I was called up by the Forced Labor Service, but I deserted on October 10, 1944.

I think a composer is always interested in his last work.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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