Gyorgy Quotes

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

#2. Optical units close to each other on a picture plane tend to be seen together and, consequently, one can stabilize them in coherent figures.

Gyorgy Kepes

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

#4. Creative activity is not a superimposed, extraneous task against which the body, or brain protests, but an orchestration of ... joyful doing.

Gyorgy Kepes

#5. I only want to give a metaphysic for my music.

Gyorgy Ligeti

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

#7. Steinberg is great. I should like to meet him.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#8. Our human nature is profoundly phototropic. Men obey their deepest instincts when they hold fast to light.

Gyorgy Kepes

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

#13. Thus the fundamental form-determining intention of the novel is objectivised as the psychology of the novel's heroes: they are seekers.

Gyorgy Lukacs

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

#15. 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.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#16. There is no reasonable doubt that existentialism will soon become the predominant philosophical current among bourgeois intellectuals. (1949)

Gyorgy Lukacs

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

#19. I lived under the Nazis and under the Communists.

Gyorgy Ligeti

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

#21. 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.

Gyorgy Ligeti

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

#24. Kafka was a realist

Gyorgy Lukacs

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

#26. 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.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#27. 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.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#28. Two basic values, autonomy and solidarity, serve as helpful prompters in any decision-making process.

Gyorgy Konrad

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

#30. Philosophy is transcendental homelessness; it is the urge to be at home everywhere

Gyorgy Lukacs

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

#32. The most convincing artistic forms of our time are inner models of structural vitality and social relevance. They give us confidence that in spite of everything there is still quality to life.

Gyorgy Kepes

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

#38. I don't use old music.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#39. The really great visual experience today is to fly over a huge city and look down into the night. It's like a tremendous jubilant Christmas tree. You just feel life is worth living when you come down you may have some doubts.

Gyorgy Kepes

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

#43. I like to stay home and listen to recordings.

Gyorgy Ligeti

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

#45. 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.

Gyorgy Ligeti