235 Quotes by John Cage

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.'

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.