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The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is 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.
Materials
Silence
Sound
Music
Integrating
Composing
Material

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There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.
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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.
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My work became an exploration of non-intention.
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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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The world is teeming anything can happen.
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My favourite music is the music I haven't yet heard. I don't hear the music I write: I write in order to hear the music I haven't yet heard.
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Now that we have everything we need, we discover that there is almost nothing that we have that we want
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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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What right do I have to be in the woods, if the woods are not in me.
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It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
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There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
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In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.
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Some people take music too seriously, and some don't take it seriously enough, others take it just right.
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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.
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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.
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Art is whatever you can get away with.
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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.
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It is not futile to do what we do. We wake up with energy and we do something. And we make, of course, failures and we make mistakes, but we sometimes get glimpses of what we might do next.
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Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.
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My favorite music is the music I haven't yet heard
John Cage