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All great art is a form of complaint

John Cage

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John Cage
Age: 79 †
Born: 1912
Born: September 5
Died: 1992
Died: August 2
Composer
Illustrator
Music Theorist
Musician
Musicologist
Painter
Philosopher
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
LA
California
John Milton Cage Jr.
John Milton Cage
Jr.
John Milton
Jr. Cage
J. C.
Complaint
Complaints
Art
Form
Great

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Music is edifying, for from time to time it sets the soul in operation.
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Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression free as a bird, Morton Feldman went to a park one day and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, You know? They're not free: they're fighting over bits of food.
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The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.
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Beware of losing what isn't in your head.
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The responsibility of the artist consists in perfecting his work so that it may become attractively disinteresting.
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Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
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In the nature of the use of chance operations is the belief that all answers answer all questions.
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If someone says can't, that shows you what to do.
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One shouldn't go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.
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A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.
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...we make our lives by what we love.
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There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.
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The grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning.
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Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
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Guy Nearing told us it's a good idea when hunting mushrooms to have a pleasant goal, a waterfall for instance, and, having reached it, to return another way. When, however, we're obliged to go and come back by the same path, returning we notice mushrooms we hadn't noticed going out.
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We are involved in a life that passes understanding and our highest business is our daily life.
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Composing for the prepared piano is not a criticism of the instrument. I'm only being practical.
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People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is.
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The world is teeming anything can happen.
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In the dark, all cats are black.
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