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Beware of losing what isn't in your head.

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.
Beware
Losing
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.
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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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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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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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Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.
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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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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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It's useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep.
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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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Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of it's own accord.
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My work became an exploration of non-intention.
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As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.
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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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...we make our lives by what we love.
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What I'm proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude - that you act as though you've never been there before. So that you're not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.
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There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.
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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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The act of listening is in fact an act of composing.
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In an utter emptiness anything can take place.
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