Top 148 Quotes & Sayings by John Cage - Page 3

College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.

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.

I don't need sound to talk to me.

We are living in a period in which many people have changed their mind about what the use of music is or could be for them. Something that doesn't speak or talk like a human being, that doesn't know its definition in the dictionary or its theory in the schools, that expresses itself simply by the fact of its vibrations. People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is.

One need not fear for the future of music.

Composing for the prepared piano is not a criticism of the instrument. I'm only being practical.

Each moment presents what happens.

A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.

Now that things are so simple, there's so much to do.

Everyday is a beautiful day, Everything is pleasing

The truth is that everything causes everything else. We do not speak therefore of one thing causing another. There are no secrets. It's just we thought they said dead when they said bread.

Theatre takes place all the time - wherever one is - and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.

Everything we do is music." (Classical Composer)(From: 4'33")

Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.

Some people take music too seriously, and some don't take it seriously enough, others take it just right.

We are simple-minded enough to think that if we were saying something we would use words. We are rather doing something. The meaning of what we do is determined by each one who sees and hears it.

I needed another basis for musical structure. This I found in sound's duration parameter, sound's only parameter which is present even when no sound is intended.

No one can have an idea once he starts really listening.

If there are questions then, of course, there are answers, but the final answer makes the questions seem absurd.

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.

I imagine that as contemporary music goes on changing in the way that I'm changing it what will be done is to more and more completely liberate sounds from abstract ideas about them and more and more exactly to let them be physically uniquely themselves. This means for me: knowing more and more not what I think a sound is but what it actually is in all of its acoustical details and then letting this sound exist, itself, changing in a changing sonorous environment.

Percussion music is revolution. Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to the restrictions of nineteenth century music. Today we are fighting for their emancipation. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom. At the present stage of revolution, a healthy lawlessness is warranted. Experiment must necessarily be carried on by hitting anything-tin pans, rice bowls, iron pipes-anything we can lay our hands on. Not only hitting, but rubbing, scraping, making sound in every possible way...What we can't do ourselves will be done by machines which we will invent.

If someone says can't, that shows you what to do.

Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.

As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.

Combine nursing homes with nursery schools. Bring very old and very young together: they interest one another.

You can feel an emotion; just don't think that it's so important.

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?