John Cage

Food, one assumes, provides nourishment; but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction.

Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?

There was a German philosopher who is very well known, his name was Immanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don’t have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter. Don’t have to mean anything that is, in order to give us deep pleasure.

I remember loving sound before I ever took a music lesson. And so we make our lives by what we love.

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

People who aren't artists often feel that artists are inspired. But if you work at your art you don't have time to be inspired.

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.

For myself and my own experience now, I don't really need any music. I have enough to listen to with just the sounds of the environment. I listen to the sounds of 6th avenue.

My favorite piece [piece of music] is the one we hear all the time if we are quiet.

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.

It's useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep.

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.

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

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

Music is a means of rapid transportation.

A mind that is interested in changing...is interested precisely in the things that are at extremes. I'm certainly like that. Unless we go to extremes, we won't get anywhere.

To accept whatever comes, regardless of the consequences, is to be unafraid.

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.

Everything you do is music, and everywhere is the best seat.

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

An artist conscientiously moves in a direction which for some good reason he takes, putting one work in front of the other with the hope he'll arrive before death overtakes him.