"If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not."
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Quote collection
John Cage quotes (page 6 of 8)
146 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"What right do I have to be in the woods, if the woods are not in me."
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"Why do you not do as I do? Letting go of your thoughts as though they were the cold ashes of a long dead fire?"
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"I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing."
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"Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living."
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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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"To accept whatever comes, regardless of the consequences, is to be unafraid."
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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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"What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord."
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"Beware of losing what isn't in your head."
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"...we make our lives by what we love."
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"I remember loving sound before I ever took a music lesson. And so we make our lives by what we love."
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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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"In an utter emptiness anything can take place."
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"An artist conscientiously moves in a direction which for some good reason he takes, putting one work in front of the other with the hope he'll arrive before death overtakes him."
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"My work became an exploration of non-intention."
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"In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall."
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"Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression "free as a bird," Morton Feldman went to a park one day and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, "You know? They're not free: they're fighting over bits of food."
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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."
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"The world, the real is not an object. It is a process."
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