Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Everyone is born lazy.
Big forms fascinate me.
For me, music is pure abstraction.
I always had my roots in the past.
Works of art inspire me to compose.
Latin is an international language.
I'm really just a frustrated violinist.
One should live with history round one.
Composers are very individual creatures.
I love Shostakovich. We were good friends.
I have lived through very difficult times.
I always felt independent of musical fashion.
Usually composers need a reason to write. I need a deadline.
All I'm interested in is liberating sound beyond all tradition.
I have written many works to accompany Old Church Slavonic texts.
Every day I write. I am not waiting for a great idea from heaven.
I think the best publicity I can get for my music is to conduct it.
That is our dilemma in Poland. We don't like to be ruled by the East.
I don't write political music. Political music is immediately obsolete.
Poles have a mistrust of the West and an even deeper mistrust of the East.
There is some limit to finding, always, new things. It's rather impossible.
Poland is my home, my roots are here. There is nowhere I would rather live.
I have found my perfect place on earth in Poland, in Luslawice, near Krakow.
The circumstances In which I grew up In Poland were not auspicious for humor.
I started studying counterpoint and theory with a physicist whose hobby was music.
I studied violin since I was a boy, and my dream was to be a violinist and to play.
You can only learn orchestration if you have the possibility of using an orchestra.
I have about 1,700 species of trees, almost everything that can grow in our climate.
I have always had an audience for my music, even in the very avant garde, crazy times.
In summer, I like to sit and compose on the porch, where I can see people come and go.
I'm not a minimalist, not at all. I feel much better, safer even, having a large piece.
Listening to classical music is like reading philosophy books. Not everybody has to do it.
Writing music is something very natural... this is the way to communicate with other people.
At school, I wrote in the style of the Dutch composers. After I graduated, a new style set in.
After so many years, I don't really think writing has to be absolutely new. No. It has to be good work.
I don't like to be alone. I like to have my family around me. They disturb me, of course, but that's OK.
I must never change my way - because of critics who may not like it - I preserve my language and my style.
Our house was in the middle of town; behind it was the ghetto, from which Jews were sent to concentration camps.
If I were reborn, if I were a teen-ager now, starting my career as a composer, I would do again what I have done.
It's no longer possible to find something which will shock other people, because everything has already been done.
Chopin is a great composer who influenced many, many important composers. He was a great innovator, especially in harmony.
The communists saw what we did in the arts as the only product of socialism that was known in the West, so they tolerated it.
In my own works I am an obsessionist. Though I write humorous music too, much of it has been obsessed by death and the tragic.
I'm never satisfied. I don't think about what has come before because I'm trying to find something different than I did before.
I began as a violinist, not a composer. Thus my contact with orchestral musicians, with the source of music, is very important.
My grandfather taught me trees and the Latin names of trees when I was five or six. His father was a forester, so he knew them all.
Traveling, talking to people, and rehearsing, I'm always finding new ideas. If I stay in one place, maybe I won't have so many ideas.
For years, my favorite composers had been Monteverdi and Bach. Then I began to rediscover the 19th century, see it from another perspective.
I don't really think my work breaks into periods. In fact, if you listen to my work in all its so-called periods, what you should hear is continuity.
My music is rather abstract and maybe even strange-sounding for some people, so maybe that's why it's been used in so many horror movies and thrillers.