John Cage Quotes

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

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

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)?

At Black Mountain College in 1952, I organized an event that involved the paintings of Bob Rauschenberg, the dancing of Merce Cunningham, films, slides, phonograph records, radios, the poetries of w:Charles Olson and M. C. Richards recited from the tops of ladders, and the pianism of David Tudor, together with my 'Juilliard lecture', which ends: 'A piece of string, a sunset, each acts.' The audience was seated in the center of all this activity. Later that summer, vacationing in New England, I visited America's first synagogue, to discover that the congregation was there seated precisely the way I had arranged the audience at Black Mountain.

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

The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.

Więcej za pomocą mniej.

...WHEREAS, IN THE PAST, THE POINT OF DISAGREEMENT HAS BEEN BETWEEN DISSONANCE AND CONSONANCE, IT WILL BE, IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE, BETWEEN NOISE AND SO-CALLED MUSICAL SOUNDS.

they come
different and the same
with each it is different and the same
with each the absence of love is different
with each the absence of love is the same

Each day his eyes and ears were open and empty to see and hear the world he lived in.
Music, he said, is continuous; only listening is intermittent.

John Cage, 1979, reflecting on Henry David Thoreau’s solo sojourn in Walden Woods, 1845-47.

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

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.

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

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.

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.