Quote

I don't need sound to talk to me.

John Cage

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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.
Talk
Sound
Need
Needs

More quotes by John Cage

Image
Music is edifying, for from time to time it sets the soul in operation.
John Cage
Image
The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.
John Cage
Image
If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.
John Cage
Image
A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.
John Cage
Image
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
Image
Whether I make them or not, there are always sounds to be heard and all of them are excellent.
John Cage
Image
We're breaking all of the rules, even our own rules, and how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.
John Cage
Image
An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.
John Cage
Image
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
Image
Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.
John Cage
Image
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
Image
The grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning.
John Cage
Image
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.
John Cage
Image
In the nature of the use of chance operations is the belief that all answers answer all questions.
John Cage
Image
In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.
John Cage
Image
Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
John Cage
Image
No one can have an idea once he starts really listening.
John Cage
Image
The Indians long ago knew that music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn't stop when one turned away.
John Cage
Image
As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.
John Cage
Image
Food, one assumes, provides nourishment but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction.
John Cage