Pierre Boulez Quotes

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

When I look back now, it must have been like Paris was at the time of Le Sacre du Printemps.

The first music I was exposed to was Stravinsky and I loved it but I don't remember it.

On my mental iPod, I always have Stravinsky and Ravel.

The Second World War simplified things like race, and people came down on very clear lines.

I often compare myself as a kid to my own grandchildren, who are around 11 and 14 now. That's the age kids usually read my book. And I remember myself; we'd gone through a world war. My father was an army officer so I was aware of what was going on. But I wasn't bombarded with images of catastrophe like many kids are today.

If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail.

I only take vitamin B complex. Before World War II, I used to take ionized yeast, because in the pre-war era we never heard about vitamins.

I was born in Vienna on November 7, 1929, eleven years after the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire fell apart following its defeat in World War I.

The Great War proved how confused the world is. Depression is proving it again.

Parallels between classical and pop are not new. The whole San Francisco movement of John Cage and Terry Riley went hand in glove with what the Velvet Underground were doing.

I was so busy with my studies that I didn't have a musical idol as a teenager. Later, around my 20s, I suddenly discovered the Beatles and the Rolling Stones but I guess my musical idol has always been Strauss.

If I had been born in Paris in the early 1900s and lived through World War II, I feel like my DNA would've been Henri Baurel.

I am not saying that Hitler was a choir boy. But I am saying, let him who was innocent in the Second World War cast the first stone.

With the World War II era, there's so much written material to draw on. When you go back to the 14th century, you have to imagine more.

The thing about Hemingway that people forget is that all the stuff he did was at a time where people weren't traveling that much. At 19 he travels to Italy. He goes to the Spanish Civil War. He goes to China, he goes to Africa so at that time to travel that much is really incredible.

The memory of the Second World War hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous.

Readers want to have the confidence that you understand the era in which the book is set, so for 'The Perfumer's Secret,' I needed to know everything about the First World War from a French perspective. I had to understand those people and that town in 1914.

The adverse economic events following the First World War turned me toward economics.

Here is a pretty good rule of thumb for Democratic Presidents: if it didn't work for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who won four terms and a World War, it probably won't work for you either.

There was always dance in opera until people forgot to keep it going.

I really became convinced I wanted to tell the story of the real-life model for the Degas sculpture 'Little Dancer Aged 14,' which was unveiled in 1881, the Belle Epoque.

She doesn't understand the concept of Roman numerals. She thought we just fought in world war eleven.

I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world,' but we had children by the dozen and got married.

I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.