Quote

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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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.
Begin
Talent
Overpopulated
Somebody
Dime
Food
Dimes
Point
Dozen
Actually
Burn
Art
Gotten
People
Burning

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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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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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Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.
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In the dark, all cats are black.
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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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Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
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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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If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.
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...we make our lives by what we love.
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Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.
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An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.
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We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
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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 far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.
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My favorite music is the music I haven't yet heard
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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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Why do you not do as I do? Letting go of your thoughts as though they were the cold ashes of a long dead fire?
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Guy Nearing told us it's a good idea when hunting mushrooms to have a pleasant goal, a waterfall for instance, and, having reached it, to return another way. When, however, we're obliged to go and come back by the same path, returning we notice mushrooms we hadn't noticed going out.
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The act of listening is in fact an act of composing.
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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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