John Cage Quotes

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

Good music can act as a guide to good living.

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

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

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.

I don't need sound to talk to me.

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

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.

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.

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

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

The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in.

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

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.

The world is teeming; anything can happen.

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

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

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

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

In an utter emptiness anything can take place.

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.

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.

In the dark, all cats are black.

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

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.

One need not fear for the future of music.

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.

I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing.

I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, 'You'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through.' So I said, 'I'll beat my head against that wall.'

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

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

A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.

Beware of losing what isn't in your head.

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

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

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

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.

All great art is a form of complaint

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.