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What right do I have to be in the woods, if the woods are not in me.

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.
Nature
Right
Woods

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In the dark, all cats are black.
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Music is edifying, for from time to time it sets the soul in operation.
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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.
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Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.
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There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.
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Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
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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.
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An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.
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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.
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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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All great art is a form of complaint
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If someone says can't, that shows you what to do.
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When we separate music from life we get is art.
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...we make our lives by what we love.
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Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
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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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Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
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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.
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Composing for the prepared piano is not a criticism of the instrument. I'm only being practical.
John Cage
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I don't need sound to talk to me.
John Cage