235 Quotes by John Cage

  • Author John Cage
  • Quote

    One shouldn’t go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.

  • Share


  • Author John Cage
  • Quote

    When I went to the analyst for a kind of preliminary meeting, he said, ‘I’ll be able to fix you so that you’ll write much more music than you do now.’ I said, ‘Good heavens! I already write too much, it seems to me.’ That promise of his put me off.

  • Share

  • Author John Cage
  • Quote

    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.

  • Share

  • Author John Cage
  • Quote

    Power and profit structures’re out of cahoots with current technology. Aware of new inventions, corporations put them aside, waiting for competitive reasons until they’re obliged to use new gimmicks.

  • Share

  • Author John Cage
  • Quote

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

  • Share

  • Author John Cage
  • Quote

    If someone says can’t, that shows you what to do.

  • Share

  • Author John Cage
  • Quote

    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.

  • Share

  • Author John Cage
  • Quote

    I like being moved. I don’t like being pushed.

  • Share