"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
"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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Source: John Cage (2011). “Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition”, Wesleyan University Press
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More quotes by John Cage
"There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot."
"Everything you do is music, and everywhere is the best seat."
"A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration--it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself."
"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."
"The act of listening is in fact an act of composing."