György Ligeti

“My music is a criticism of totalitarianism.”

“There are no keys in my music.”

“I consider my own music to be a critique of the stupidity of the world.”

“I am in a prison. One wall is the avant-garde, the other is the past. I want to escape.”

“My music is not 'modern' in the sense of being 'new'. It is a continuation of the great tradition of Western art music.”

“There are no 'final' works. Everything I write is a work in progress.”

“My formal thinking is closer to architecture or to the growth of crystals.”

“I am in a prison. One wall is the avant-garde, the other is the past. I want to escape.”

“What I write is a kind of organized chaos.”

“All art is artificial. The question is, how artificial?”

“What I am trying to do is to create a music that is completely new, but which is also very old.”

“I am not interested in expressing myself. I'm interested in constructing things.”

“I have always been fascinated by illusions.”

“If you don't know what to do, do something else.”

“Complexity is not a goal in itself, but it is a necessary consequence of the richness of the musical ideas.”

“For me, the greatest discovery of the twentieth century in music was the discovery of the irrational.”

“The technical and the expressive are one and the same for me.”

“All art is artificial. The clumsiest art is the art that tries to be natural.”

“For me, music is not a language. Music is a structured object.”

“I am not a Hungarian composer, but a composer from Hungary.”