Gyorgy Ligeti Quotations

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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 like to stay home and listen to recordings.

I lived under the Nazis and under the Communists.

I only want to give a metaphysic for my music.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

My father was a bank clerk. He was also a Utopian Socialist and he wrote a Utopian novel. It was a kind of allegory or fairy tale.

Steinberg is great. I should like to meet him.

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

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

I don't use old music.

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

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.

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

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.