From his autobiography, about his first trip to America in 1925:
“Without stopping to describe my visual impressions on landing in New York — skyscrapers, traffic, lights, Negroes, cinemas, theatres, in fact all that rouses the curiosity of foreigners, and very rightly so — I want to begin by bearing witness as a musician to the fact that in the United States, side by side with a pronounced weakness for the freakish and the sensational, I found a real taste for the art of music, as manifested by the many societies devoted to musical culture and by the magnificent orchestras munificently endowed by private individuals. In this respect the United States reminded me of Germany and Russia.”
Related:
Picasso’s Stravinksy — amusing anecdote.