A Quote by John Cage

I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, 'You'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through.' So I said, 'I'll beat my head against that wall.'
After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, ‘In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.’ I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, ‘In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’
You know, you look at Israel - Israel has a wall and everyone said do not build a wall, walls do not work - 99.9 percent of people trying to come across that wall cannot get across and more. Bibi Netanyahu told me the wall works.
I had an apartment and I had a neighbor, and whenever he would knock on my wall I knew he wanted me to turn my music down and that made me angry 'cause I like loud music... so when he knocked on the wall, I'd mess with his head. I'd say Go around I cannot open the wall I dunno if you have a door on your side but over here there's nothin'. It's just flat.
It's like banging my head against the wall, except if I were actually banging my head on a wall, I'd be able to make myself stop.
I never have [suffered writer’s block], although I’ve had books that didn’t work out. I had to stop writing them. I just abandoned them. It was depressing, but it wasn’t the end of the world. When it really isn’t working, and you’ve been bashing yourself against the wall, it’s kind of a relief. I mean, sometimes you bash yourself against the wall and you get through it. But sometimes the wall is just a wall. There’s nothing to be done but go somewhere else.
If you are in front of a wall that you cannot get past, would you just keep banging your head into the wall?... No, you would find a new wall.
President-elect [Donald] Trump has said thousands of times, I will build a wall. He didn't just say he'll build a wall. I'll build a great wall and it will be a beautiful wall, and I'll make the Mexicans pay for it.
My practicality consists in this, in the knowledge that if you beat your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall - that is my strength, my only strength.
If you beat your head against the wall, it is your head that breaks and not the wall.
You have to work to carve out your own little corner, and I'm certainly smacking my head against the wall trying to make a dent. I just hope I don't get brain-damaged before I get there
I wasn't accepted the first time I tried to get into drama school. I said, 'I'll give this one more shot... and if that doesn't work, I won't bang my head against this painful brick wall.'
I shot me a nice deer, and I hung it on the den wall in my house. My neighbor comes over and he says, Did you shoot that thing? I said, Nope. He ran through the wall and got stuck. Here's your sign.
What is drawing? How does one get there? It's working one's way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How can one get through that wall? - since hammering on it doesn't help at all. In my view, one must undermine the wall and grind through it slowly and patiently.
It's starting to sink in," Corny said. "I can almost look at you without wanting to bang my head against the wall.
Perseverance is the most overrated of traits, if it is unaccompanied by talent; beating your head against a wall is more likely to produce a concussion in the head than a hole in the wall.
When John Kennedy was assassinated I was twenty-three, a stockbroker on Wall Street and married, and I never ever thought that politics would be anything that I would be a part of. But I realized that I had to get involved. Then, when Martin Luther King was assassinated and the Vietnam War was raging, I felt that my world was falling apart. I had these two beautiful children - three and one - and I just said, "I have to make it better."
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