Home › Authors › John Cage
John Cage Quotes
1912–1992 United States
John Cage (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer. A pioneer of chance music, electronic music and non-standard use of musical instruments.
United States Anarchists Composers Musicians Pianists Also known as: Cage, John
Random John Cage quote
15 quotes
A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.
Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.
I have nothing to say/ and I am saying it/ and that is poetry/ as I need it.
Lecture on Nothing (1949)
Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
Richard Kostelanetz (1988)
Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not possess it) and thus need not fear its loss.
We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
Lecture on Nothing (1949)
Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.
As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
Richard Kostelanetz (1988)
I remember loving sound before I ever took a music lesson. And so we make our lives by what we love.
Lecture on Nothing (1949)
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.
I can't speak or write German, but I'am overjoyed because I have bought one of your pictures. Now it is in me. I write music. You are my teacher.
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.
I once asked Aragon, the historian, how history was written. He said, 'You have to invent it.' When I wish as now to tell of critical incidents, persons, and events that have influenced my life and work, the true answer is all of the incidents were critical, all of the people influenced me, everything that happened and that is still happening influences me.
Topics John Cage is quoted on
Works