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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.

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.
Hear
Heard
Write
Order
Music
Writing
Favourite
Havens
Haven

More quotes by 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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Beware of losing what isn't in your head.
John Cage
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When we separate music from life we get is art.
John Cage
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There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.
John Cage
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I don't need sound to talk to me.
John Cage
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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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Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.
John Cage
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As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.
John Cage
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For myself and my own experience now, I don't really need any music. I have enough to listen to with just the sounds of the environment. I listen to the sounds of 6th avenue.
John Cage
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...we make our lives by what we love.
John Cage
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There are some good people in it, but the orchestra as a whole is equivalent to a gang bent on destruction.
John Cage
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It's useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep.
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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In the dark, all cats are black.
John Cage
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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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In the nature of the use of chance operations is the belief that all answers answer all questions.
John Cage
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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.
John Cage
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To accept whatever comes, regardless of the consequences, is to be unafraid.
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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I want to change my way of seeing, NOT my way of feeling. I was perfectly happy about my feelings.
John Cage