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

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

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

I only want to give a metaphysic for my music.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I lived under the Nazis and under the Communists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steinberg is great. I should like to meet him.

I don't use old music.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judaism has always been a strong interest of mine. My two sons speak Hebrew and are familiar with the scriptures and with rabbinic literature. This is the way we live.

Examples one finds in the philosophical literature are somebody who's seen the trial of a child of theirs, where they're being proved guilty of some crime that would drive the parent into a depression, maybe a suicidal depression.

During our stay in London for the first time I was able to establish personal contact with some of the organic chemists, whose work I knew and admired from the literature. I found them most gracious and helpful.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

Jesus claimed He had the power to raise himself from the dead and His followers would be raised from the dead. That's a unique claim in the literature of religion.

The Arab world also won the Nobel with me. I believe that international doors have opened, and that from now on, literate people will consider Arab literature also. We deserve that recognition.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern.

Acquiring a repertoire in these days, when the vocal literature is so immense, so overwhelming, that the student with sense will devote all his energies to work and not imagine himself a martyr to art.

I think Maus I is better than Maus II. The standard here is whether or not it's as good as a great book of prose literature and by that standard, no, it's not that great.

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.

I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

The study of social progress is today not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.

The concept of industry domination of regulatory agencies was well known and documented in the literature by the 1960s.

It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

The proverbial philosophy of a people helps us to understand more about them than any other kind of literature.

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

Literature is the immortality of speech.

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.