"If you don't have enough time to accomplish something, consider the work finished once it's begun."
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Quote collection
John Cage quotes (page 7 of 8)
146 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Everything we do is music." (Classical Composer)(From: 4'33")"
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"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."
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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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"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."
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"The white paintings came first; my silent piece came later."
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"Everything I see is something I haven't memorized."
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"We only hear what we listen for."
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"Nothing more than nothing can be said."
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"If there are questions then, of course, there are answers, but the final answer makes the questions seem absurd."
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"If someone says can't, that shows you what to do."
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"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."
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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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"You can feel an emotion; just don't think that it's so important."
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"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."
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"Each moment presents what happens."
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"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."
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"As McLuhan says, everything happens at once."
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"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."
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"Combine nursing homes with nursery schools. Bring very old and very young together: they interest one another."
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