Top 100 Quotes About John Cage: Famous Quotes & Sayings About John Cage

#1. I have this ideal listener, as John Cage did. This listener doesn't bring expectations that my music will fit into some part of music history, or that it will do any particular thing. This listener is just open to listening.

Missy Mazzoli

#2. I grew up mostly in Champaign, Illinois. My dad was at the University of East Illinois, so I was always around the music. One of my dad's buddies was the avant-garde composer John Cage, so I picked up on that weird classical and eclectic music.

Stuart Hamm

#3. The thinking of John Cage derived from Duchamp and Dada. I was not interested in that.

Sol LeWitt

#4. All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#5. I did a twenty foot print and John Cage is involved in that because he was the only person I knew in New York who had a car and who would be willing to do this.

Robert Rauschenberg

#6. My intention has been, often, to say what I had to say in a way that would exemplify it; that would, conceivably, permit the listener to experience what I had to say rather than just hear about it. - John Cage

Kay Larson

#7. Also, I liked John Cage's music. I liked it for its craziness, the use of silence, the boldness-anything to get me away from writing about.. I don't know what academic poets write about.

Kenneth Koch

#8. I'm especially interested in the music of John Cage ... I would like to do some experimenting with the relationship between his freeform sound and free-form art.

Jasper Johns

#9. The first time I came to New York in 1952, I was busy with music. I made the acquaintance at this period with John Cage, and also the acquaintance of Varese for the first time. We were very good friends. He gave me some scores, and we recorded them a little later.

Pierre Boulez

#10. The heating systems composed works in the style of John Cage.

David Mitchell

#11. Parallels between classical and pop are not new. The whole San Francisco movement of John Cage and Terry Riley went hand in glove with what the Velvet Underground were doing.

Charles Hazlewood

#12. John Cage made you realise that there wasn't a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn't appreciated.

Brian Eno

#13. 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.

John Cage

#14. Frost interviewing Noel Coward and Margaret Mead. Sir Noel's view of life is Sir Noel. Mead's mind is large and open, like Buckminster Fuller's. She found thoughts dull that suggest that men are superior to animals or plants.

John Cage

#15. 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.

John Cage

#16. What I'm proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude - that you act as though you've never been there before. So that you're not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.

John Cage

#17. Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.

John Cage

#18. Advocating well with a personal story is not a call to simply Insert Story Here.

John Capecci And Timothy Cage

#19. 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.

John Cage

#20. 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.

John Cage

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

John Cage

#22. I don't need sound to talk to me,

John Cage

#23. 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.

John Cage

#24. 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.

John Cage

#25. 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.

John Cage

#26. I believe the use of noise to make music will increase until we reach a
music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make
available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.

John Cage

#27. My work became an exploration of non-intention.

John Cage

#28. 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.

John Cage

#29. I am now a man of despair, rejected, abandoned, shut up in this iron cage from which there is no escape.

John Bunyan

#30. 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.

John Cage

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

#33. The power of your story may not lie in its drama, but in its absolutely perfect relationship to your cause.

John Capecci And Timothy Cage

#34. 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?

John Cage

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

#37. He suggests that contraceptive substances be added to basic foods ... Should a couple wish to have a child, they'd go to special stores to procure their food. Every child a wanted child.

John Cage

#38. 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.

John Cage

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

John Cage

#40. Imprisoned in a cage of sound, even the trivial seems profound

John Betjeman

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

John Cage

#42. Whereas what we need is to fumble around in the darkness, because that's where our lives (not necessarily all of the time, but at least some of the time, and particularly when life gets problematical for us) takes place.

John Cage

#43. 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.

John Cage

#44. Politicians wishing to set a better tone should have the discipline to avoid televised cage matches.

John Sununu

#45. 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.

John Cage

#46. Everyday is a beautiful day, Everything is pleasing

John Cage

#47. 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.

John Cage

#48. 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.

John Cage

#49. 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.

John Cage

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

John Cage

#51. 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.

John Cage

#52. We need not destroy the past. It is gone.

John Cage

#53. A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.

John Cage

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

John Cage

#55. 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.

John Cage

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

John Cage

#57. There is nothing we need to do that isn't dangerous.

John Cage

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

#63. 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.

John Cage

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

#66. 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?

John Cage

#67. Reality is the cage of those who lack imagination.

John B. S. Haldane

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

John Cage

#69. The world is teeming; anything can happen.

John Cage

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

John Cage

#71. Maybe the knowledge is too great and maybe men are growing too small. Maybe a specialist is only a coward, afraid to look out of his little cage. And think what any specialist misses - the whole world over his fence.

John Steinbeck

#72. Saw a science program the other day. Rats were crawling through their own food to get to crack cocaine. The conclusion was that rats would rather starve with food in front of them than give up crack. The conclusion was wrong: rats will do anything to forget they are in a cage ~ John P. McAfee

John P. McAfee

#73. 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.

John Cage

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

John Cage

#75. 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.

John Cage

#76. Why is it that children, taught the names of the months and the fact that there are twelve of them, don't ask why the ninth is called the seventh (September), the tenth called the eight (October), the eleventh called the ninth (November), the twelfth called the tenth (December)?

John Cage

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

#79. The workspace fell somewhere between a gerbil cage and a prison cell on the space-and-comfort scale.

John A. Heldt

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

John Cage

#81. All great art is a form of complaint

John Cage

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

John Cage

#83. We only hear what we listen for.

John Cage

#84. Hollywood has always been a cage ... a cage to catch our dreams.

John Huston

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

#87. The attitude I take is that everyday life is more interesting than forms of celebration, when we become aware of it. That when is when our intentions go down to zero. Then suddenly you notice that the world is magical.

John Cage

#88. Beware of losing what isn't in your head.

John Cage

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

John Cage

#90. 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.

John Cage

#91. People who aren't artists often feel that artists are inspired. But if you work at your art you don't have time to be inspired.

John Cage

#92. We are a breed of spoilers!' thought Jolyon, 'close and greedy; the bloom of life is not safe with us. Let her come to me as she will, when she will, not at all if she will not. Let me be just her stand-by, her perching-place; never-never her cage!

John Galsworthy