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Paper should be edible, nutritious. Inks used for printing or writing should have delicious flavors. Magazines or newspapers read at breakfast should be eaten for lunch. Instead of throwing one's mail in the waste-basket, it should be saved for the dinner guests.

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.
Paper
Breakfast
Baskets
Instead
Lunch
Ink
Read
Throwing
Printing
Used
Magazines
Eaten
Writing
Newspapers
Flavor
Nutritious
Saved
Delicious
Edible
Dinner
Guests
Flavors
Waste
Mail
Basket

More quotes by John Cage

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The attitude I take is that everyday life is more interesting than forms of celebration, when we become aware of it. That when is when our intentions go down to zero. Then suddenly you notice that the world is magical.
John Cage
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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
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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
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The world is teeming anything can happen.
John Cage
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Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.
John Cage
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Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.
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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.
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As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.
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Beware of losing what isn't in your head.
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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
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Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
John Cage
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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
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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
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There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
John Cage
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Now that we have everything we need, we discover that there is almost nothing that we have that we want
John Cage
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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
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Art is whatever you can get away with.
John Cage
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We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
John Cage
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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
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The responsibility of the artist consists in perfecting his work so that it may become attractively disinteresting.
John Cage