Every something is an echo of nothing
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.
If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.
What right do I have to be in the woods, if the woods are not in me.
...we make our lives by what we love.
Good music can act as a guide to good living.
A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.
Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.
I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left.
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.
My favourite music is the music I haven't yet heard. I don't hear the music I write: I write in order to hear the music I haven't yet heard.
There's no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.
The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.
Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. And no silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.
What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.
Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
Music is a means of rapid transportation.
It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.
After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, ‘In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.’ I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, ‘In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’
We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of 'culture.'
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.
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