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The act of listening is in fact an act of composing.
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.
Composing
Listening
Fact
Facts
More quotes by John Cage
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
I don't need sound to talk to me.
John Cage
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
When I went to the analyst for a kind of preliminary meeting, he said, 'I'll be able to fix you so that you'll write much more music than you do now.' I said, 'Good heavens! I already write too much, it seems to me.' That promise of his put me off.
John Cage
There are some good people in it, but the orchestra as a whole is equivalent to a gang bent on destruction.
John Cage
Let no one imagine that in owning a recording he has the music. The very practice of music is a celebration that we own nothing.
John Cage
If someone says can't, that shows you what to do.
John Cage
There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.
John Cage
One shouldn't go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.
John Cage
Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.
John Cage
Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
John Cage
When you make music you are acting as a philosopher. You can either do that consciously or you can do it unconsciously, but you're doing it.
John Cage
What I'm proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude - that you act as though you've never been there before. So that you're not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.
John Cage
I want to change my way of seeing, NOT my way of feeling. I was perfectly happy about my feelings.
John Cage
Music is edifying, for from time to time it sets the soul in operation.
John Cage
My work became an exploration of non-intention.
John Cage
When we separate music from life we get is art.
John Cage
In the dark, all cats are black.
John Cage
Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
John Cage
...we make our lives by what we love.
John Cage
