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There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.

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.
Opinion
Always
Eager
Incapable
Lazy
Opinions
Critics
Fashion

More quotes by John Cage

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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.
John Cage
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As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.
John Cage
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If someone says can't, that shows you what to do.
John Cage
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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.
John Cage
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We only hear what we listen for.
John Cage
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Some people take music too seriously, and some don't take it seriously enough, others take it just right.
John Cage
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Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
John Cage
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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.
John Cage
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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?
John Cage
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Whether I make them or not, there are always sounds to be heard and all of them are excellent.
John Cage
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Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.
John Cage
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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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The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.
John Cage
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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.
John Cage
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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.
John Cage
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The world is teeming anything can happen.
John Cage
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Out of the work comes the work.
John Cage
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One shouldn't go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.
John Cage
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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.
John Cage
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I don't need sound to talk to me.
John Cage