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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

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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.
Writing
Promise
Much
Already
Preliminary
Kind
Went
Analyst
Good
Heaven
Analysts
Write
Psychoanalysis
Seems
Heavens
Able
Meeting
Music
Meetings

More quotes by John Cage

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I don't need sound to talk to me.
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Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.
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In the dark, all cats are black.
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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.
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My work became an exploration of non-intention.
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People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is.
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To accept whatever comes, regardless of the consequences, is to be unafraid.
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In the nature of the use of chance operations is the belief that all answers answer all questions.
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The grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning.
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One shouldn't go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.
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Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.
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The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.
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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.
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The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.
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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.
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Music is a means of rapid transportation.
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...we make our lives by what we love.
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In an utter emptiness anything can take place.
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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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The responsibility of the artist consists in perfecting his work so that it may become attractively disinteresting.
John Cage