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Why do you not do as I do? Letting go of your thoughts as though they were the cold ashes of a long dead fire?
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.
Though
Long
Ashes
Letting
Thoughts
Cold
Dead
Fire
More quotes by John Cage
As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.
John Cage
When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.
John Cage
It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
John Cage
We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
John Cage
Composing for the prepared piano is not a criticism of the instrument. I'm only being practical.
John Cage
If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.
John Cage
So somebody has talent? So what? Dime a dozen. And we're overpopulated. Actually we have more food than we have people and more art. We've gotten to the point of burning food. When will we begin to burn our art?
John Cage
The world, the real is not an object. It is a process.
John Cage
Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
John Cage
Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.
John Cage
My favourite music is the music I haven't yet heard. I don't hear the music I write: I write in order to hear the music I haven't yet heard.
John Cage
What right do I have to be in the woods, if the woods are not in me.
John Cage
Beware of losing what isn't in your head.
John Cage
I don't need sound to talk to me.
John Cage
For myself and my own experience now, I don't really need any music. I have enough to listen to with just the sounds of the environment. I listen to the sounds of 6th avenue.
John Cage
It's useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep.
John Cage
Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.
John Cage
If this word music is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.
John Cage
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.
John Cage
It is not futile to do what we do. We wake up with energy and we do something. And we make, of course, failures and we make mistakes, but we sometimes get glimpses of what we might do next.
John Cage
