John Cage Quotes

Music is a means of rapid transportation.

If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.

Dad's oil dehydrator was a contained electrostatic field, one electrode down the center, the other the container's inner wall. Principal problem was finding a dielectric to separate the two. Refuse oil poured in came out as oil of the highest grade, dry chemicals, and drinking water. Petroleum Rectifying Company successfully prohibited its use.

The world is teeming; anything can happen.

We need not destroy the past. It is gone.

I want to change my way of seeing, NOT my way of feeling. I was perfectly happy about my feelings.

An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.

Clothes I wear for mushroom hunting are rarely sent to the cleaner. They constitute a collection of odors I produce and gather while rambling in the woods. I notice not only dogs (cats, too) are delighted (they love to smell me).

My favorite piece of music is the one we hear all the time if we are quiet.

Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in.

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.

Corporate Responsibility; Environmental Preservation; Consumer Protection; Sex & Race Discrimination (they must mean Sex and Race Liberation).

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.

Paper should be edible, nutritious. Inks used for printing or writing should have delicious flavors. Magazines or newspapers read at breakfast should be eaten for lunch. Instead of throwing one's mail in the waste-basket, it should be saved for the dinner guests.

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.

It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.

Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.

Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It's lighter than you think.

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

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.

I want my writing to be as clear as water I can see through so that what I experienced is told without my being in any way in the way.

I remember loving sound before I ever took a music lesson. And so we make our lives by what we love.

Each moment presents what happens.

The act of listening is in fact an act of composing.

We're breaking all of the rules, even our own rules, and how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.

Look at everything. Don't close your eyes to the world around you. Look and become curious and interested in what there is to see.

Nothing more then nothing can be said.
We make our lives by what we love.
Being American, having been trained to be sentimental, I fought for noises … when the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds. There seemed to me to be no truth, no good, in anything big.
Somebody asked Debussy how he wrote music. He said: "I take all the tones there are, leave out he one's I don't want, and use all the others". Satie said: "When I was young, people told me; you'll see when you're fifty years old. Now I'm fifty. I've seen nothing".
Slowly as the talk goes on, we are getting nowhere – and that is a pleasure.
It is not irritating to be where one is, it is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
If anybody is sleepy, let him go to sleep.
All I know about method is that when I'm not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I'm working, it is quit clear I know nothing.

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.

A 'mistake' is beside the point, for once anything happens it authentically is.

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.

It is not futile to do what we do. We wake up with energy and we do something. And we make, of course, failures and we make mistakes, but we sometimes get glimpses of what we might do next.

If you don't have enough time to accomplish something, consider the work finished once it's begun.

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

The reason we life black people isn't because they're black. We like them because they're not as grey as we are.

Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not posses it) and thus need not fear its loss.

A mind that is interested in changing ... is interested precisely in the things that are at extremes. I'm certainly like that. Unless we go to extremes, we won't get anywhere.

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.

Everything you do is music, and everywhere is the best seat.

There's no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.

The grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning.

The emotions - love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are in the audience.

The usefulness of the useless is good news for artists, for art serves no useful purpose. It has to do with changing minds and spirits.

The responsibility of the artist consists in perfecting his work so that it may become attractively disinteresting.

Now we have come to the end of the part about structure. However, it occurs to me to say more about structure.

I don't need sound to talk to me,

Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck
passing by a music school?
Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical?
What if the ones inside can't hear very well, would that change my question?

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

Syntax, like government, can only be obeyed. It is
therefore of no use except when you
have something particular to command
such as: Go buy me a bunch of carrots.

...for we have found that by excluding we grow thin inside even though we may have an enormous bank account outside.

We are involved in a life that passes understanding and our highest business is our daily life.

We carry our homes within us which enables us to fly.

What right do I have to be in the woods, if the woods are not in me.

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

Remove God from the world of ideas. Remove government, politics from society. Keep sex, humor, utilities. Let private property go.

Music is edifying, for from time to time it sets the soul in operation.

In an utter emptiness anything can take place.

The Indians long ago knew that music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn't stop when one turned away.

One shouldn't go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.

One evening I was walking along Hollywood Boulevard, nothing much to do. I stopped and looked in the window of a stationary shop. A mechanized pen was suspended in space in such a way that, as a mechanized roll of paper passed by it, the pen went through the motions of the same penmanship exercises I had learned as a child in the third grade. Centrally placed in the window was an advertisement explaining the mechanical reasons for the perfection of the operation of the suspended mechanical pen. I was fascinated, for everything was going wrong. Then pen was tearing the paper to shreds and splattering in all over the window and on the advertisement, which, nevertheless, remained legible.

The white paintings came first; my silent piece came later.

Before leaving the earth altogether, let us as: How does Music stand with respect to its instruments, their pitches, the scales, modes and rows, repeating themselves from octave to octave, the chords, harmonies, and tonalities, the beats, meters, and rhythms, the degrees of amplitude (pianissimo, piano, mezzo-piano, mezzo-forte, forte, fortissimo)? Though the majority go each day to the schools where these matters are taught, they read when time permits of Cape Canaveral, Ghana, and Seoul. And they've heard tell of the music synthesizer, magnetic tape. They take for granted the dials on radios and television sets. A tardy art, the art of Music. And why so slow? Is it because, once having learned a notation of pitches and durations, musicians will not give up their Greek? Children have been modern artists for years now. What is it about Music that sends not only the young but adults too as far into the past as they can conveniently go? The module? But our choices never reached around the globe, and in our laziness, when we changed over to the twelve-tone system, we just took the pitches of the previous music as though we were moving into a furnished apartment and had no time to even take the pictures off the walls. What excuse? That nowadays things are happening so quickly that we become thoughtless? Or were we clairvoyant and knew ahead of time that the need for furniture of any kind would disappear? (Whatever you place there in front of you sits established in the air.) The

The world is no longer a romantic place; some of its people still are however, and therein lies the promise. Don't let the world win.

One need not fear for the future of music.

I haven't been to a movie for three months of Sundays. I gather from what Carolyn reports that Hollywood now produces false entertainment: unmitigated violence on the screen; snickering, laughter in the audience.

It's useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep.

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.

I never had a hat, never wore one, but recently was given a brown suede duck-hunting hat. The moment I put it on I realized I was starved for a hat. I kept it warm by putting it on my head. I made plans to wear it especially when I was going to do any thinking. Somewhere in Virginia, I lost my hat.

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

Computer mistake in grade-giving resulted in academic failure of several brilliant students. After some years the mistake was discovered. Letter was sent to each student inviting him to resume his studies. Each replied he was getting along very well without education.

Freedom from likes and dislikes, the sudden sense of identification, the spirit of comedy.

When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of 'culture.'

The function of Art is to imitate Nature in her manner of operation. Our understanding of her manner of operation&Rdquo; changes according to advances in the sciences.

Valda said that if you change your residence every six months you can legally free your children from compulsory education.

We make our lives by what we love.

A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.

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

Whether I make them or not, there are always sounds to be heard and all of them are excellent.

All great art is a form of complaint

As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.

Power and profit structures're out of cahoots with current technology. Aware of new inventions, corporations put them aside, waiting for competitive reasons until they're obliged to use new gimmicks.

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

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.

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

I have nothing to say
and I am saying it
and that is poetry
as I need it.

I like being moved. I don't like being pushed.

Only chance to make the world a success for humanity lies in technology, grand possibility technology provides to do more with less, and indiscriminately for everyone. Return to nature as nature pre-technologically was, attractive and possible as it still in some places is, can only work for some of us.

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

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

We, the garden of technology. We, undecidable.

There was a German philosopher who is very well known, his name was Immanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don't have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter. Don't have to mean anything that is, in order to give us deep pleasure.

While he rested, she asked, 'What's the difference between natives and outsiders?' 'Natives,' he replied, 'eat indoors and shit outdoors, outsiders eat outdoors and shit indoors.

There are some good people in it, but the orchestra as a whole is equivalent
to a gang bent on destruction.

In the nature of the use of chance operations is the belief that all answers answer all questions.

Every something is an echo of nothing

My favorite music is the music I haven't yet heard

My favourite music is the music I haven't yet heard. I don't hear the music I write: I write in order to hear the music I haven't yet heard.

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.

My whole desire is to run up and down the sea coast looking for you.

With just one musician, you can really do an unlimited number of things on the inside of the piano, if you have at your disposal an exploded keyboard.