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.’
I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.
The world is teeming; anything can happen.
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of it’s own accord.
Whether I make them or not, there are always sounds to be heard and all of them are excellent.
We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
I want to change my way of seeing, NOT my way of feeling. I was perfectly happy about my feelings.
The Indians long ago knew that music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn’t stop when one turned away.
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.
The act of listening is in fact an act of composing.
It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
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.
My favorite piece of music is the one we hear all the time if we are quiet.
People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is.
I never had a hat, never wore one, but recently was given a brown suede duck-hunting hat. The moment I put it on I realized I was starved for a hat. I kept it warm by putting it on my head. I made plans to wear it especially when I was going to do any thinking. Somewhere in Virginia, I lost my hat.
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 like being moved. I don’t like being pushed.
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.
Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.