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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.
Writing
Favourite
Havens
Haven
Hear
Heard
Write
Order
Music

More quotes by 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.
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Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.
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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.
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One shouldn't go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.
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If someone says can't, that shows you what to do.
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Out of the work comes the work.
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Composing for the prepared piano is not a criticism of the instrument. I'm only being practical.
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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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Everyday is a beautiful day, Everything is pleasing
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When we separate music from life we get is art.
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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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Art is whatever you can get away with.
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...we make our lives by what we love.
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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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What right do I have to be in the woods, if the woods are not in me.
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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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If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.
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The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.
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All great art is a form of complaint
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We are involved in a life that passes understanding and our highest business is our daily life.
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