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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
Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It's lighter than you think.
John Cage
Some people take music too seriously, and some don't take it seriously enough, others take it just right.
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
The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.
John Cage
The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.
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
It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
John Cage
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
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
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
Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not posses it) and thus need not fear its loss.
John Cage
Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.
John Cage
Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
John Cage
Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.
John Cage
In the dark, all cats are black.
John Cage
One day when I was studying with Schoenberg, he pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said, 'This end is more important than the other.' After twenty years I learned to write directly in ink.
John Cage
Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
John Cage
If someone says can't, that shows you what to do.
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
My work became an exploration of non-intention.
John Cage
