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The Indians long ago knew that music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn't stop when one turned away.

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.
Music
Hearing
Going
Turned
Long
Window
Like
Knew
Stop
Looking
Permanently
Away
Indians
Didn
Landscape

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In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.
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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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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?
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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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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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We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
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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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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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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.
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Some people take music too seriously, and some don't take it seriously enough, others take it just right.
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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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An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.
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Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
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The responsibility of the artist consists in perfecting his work so that it may become attractively disinteresting.
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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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The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.
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All God's religions ... have not been able to put mankind back together again.
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As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.
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The world, the real is not an object. It is a process.
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There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
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