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.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

To this day, I can never shake the connection between this boy, Peeta Mellark, and the bread that gave me hope, and the dandelion that reminded me that I was not doomed.

Managers maintain an efficient status quo while leaders attack the status quo to create something new.

A translator must, of course, be an interpreter of cultures.

Any kind of advice that I've been given to cut out carbs forever, don't do it. It just doesn't work. You do okay for a while and then you just overcarb.

The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.

I once knew a writer who, after saying beautiful things about the sea, passed through a Pacific hurricane, and he became a changed man.

Where can we take no the product, but the idea?

Wraith rubbed his hands together in cheesy horror-movie glee. “Join us or die.” He grinned. “I’ve always wanted to say that.

Innovation is born from the interaction between constraint and vision.

I've kind of learned this about Joss Whedon. Never say never. I've learned that. I also have another rule about Joss Whedon. Never say no. Just... whatever Joss Whedon wants to do, just do it.