John Cage Quotations

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.

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

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

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.

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.

The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.

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

We need not destroy the past. It is gone.

Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.

The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.

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

When we separate music from life we get art.

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.'

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

Food, one assumes, provides nourishment: but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction

I have nothing to say And I am saying it And that is poetry

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.

Beware of losing what isn't in your head.

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.

So somebody has talent? So what? Dime a dozen. And we're overpopulated. Actually we have more food than we have people and more art. We've gotten to the point of burning food. When will we begin to burn our art?

As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.

We only hear what we listen for.

Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear, which remains unsatisfied, and even uneasy, until it hears something better. I am convinced...that provided the ear be at length made amends, there are few dissonances too strong for it. Disharmony, to paraphrase Bergson's statement about disorder, is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed.

You can feel an emotion; just don't think that it's so important.

Each moment presents what happens.

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.

College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.

Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.

No one can have an idea once he starts really listening.

I don't need sound to talk to me,

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

Theatre takes place all the time - wherever one is - and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.

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?

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.

Now that we have everything we need, we discover that there is almost nothing that we have that we want

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.

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

The world, the real is not an object. It is a process.

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.

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

Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. And no silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.

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

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.

Food, one assumes, provides nourishment; but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction.

To accept whatever comes, regardless of the consequences, is to be unafraid.

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.

Where does beauty begin? Where does it end? Where it ends is where the artist begins.

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

In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.

Everything I see is something I haven't memorized.

One need not fear for the future of music.

Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot,

My work became an exploration of non-intention.

Why make art ? To quiet the mind thus making it susceptible to divine influences.

For myself and my own experience now, I don't really need any music. I have enough to listen to with just the sounds of the environment. I listen to the sounds of 6th avenue.

Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.

There are no secrets.It's just we thought that they said dead. When they said bread.

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.

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

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

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

A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.

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

Guy Nearing told us it's a good idea when hunting mushrooms to have a pleasant goal, a waterfall for instance, and, having reached it, to return another way. When, however, we're obliged to go and come back by the same path, returning we notice mushrooms we hadn't noticed going out.

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

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.

If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.

...we make our lives by what we love.

All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear I know nothing.

Nothing more than nothing can be said.

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

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

In an utter emptiness anything can take place.

There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.

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.

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

A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.

It was at Harvard not quite forty years ago that I went into an anechoic [totally silent] chamber not expecting in that silent room to hear two sounds: one high, my nervous system in operation, one low, my blood in circulation. The reason I did not expect to hear those two sounds was that they were set into vibration without any intention on my part. That experience gave my life direction, the exploration of nonintention. No one else was doing that. I would do it for us. I did not know immediately what I was doing, nor, after all these years, have I found out much. I compose music.

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

We are not committed to this or that. We are committed to the nothing in-between, whether we know it or not.

I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing.

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.

Out of the work comes the work.

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

Everyday is a beautiful day, Everything is pleasing

Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.

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.

All God's religions ... have not been able to put mankind back together again.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

When I went to the analyst for a kind of preliminary meeting, he said, 'I'll be able to fix you so that you'll write much more music than you do now.' I said, 'Good heavens! I already write too much, it seems to me.' That promise of his put me off.

When you make music you are acting as a philosopher. You can either do that consciously or you can do it unconsciously, but you're doing it.

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.

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

Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.

Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.