“As a young man I couldn't travel, nobody could travel, they wouldn't g...” — Krzysztof Penderecki Quote

“As a young man I couldn't travel, nobody could travel, they wouldn't give us a passport. For many years I was trying to go abroad. And then one day I read in the newspaper about a new competition for composers, and the first prize was a trip to the West. I decided I must get the first prize, so I wrote three pieces in three different styles.”

“I don't like to be alone. I like to have my family around me. They disturb me, of course, but that's OK.”

“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.”

“When I got to college, my sister was starting work, and she realized she had two weeks of vacation a year, so she called me and said, 'Go abroad.' So right after my freshman year, I went and I studied in Guatemala, and I studied in Kenya, and I studied in Italy, and it was incredible.”

“I studied in New York. I fell in love with an Australian-born, half-Filipina girl. So we moved to Australia when she went to her university and I moved with her. We moved to Montreal because she was going to take her year abroad, and I wanted to see if I could keep on writing there. It's really hard to make it as a writer in the Philippines.”