“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.”

“It is not futile to do what we do. We wake up with energy and we do something. And we make, of course, failures and we make mistakes, but we sometimes get glimpses of what we might do next.”

“Before leaving the earth altogether, let us as: How does Music stand with respect to its instruments, their pitches, the scales, modes and rows, repeating themselves from octave to octave, the chords, harmonies, and tonalities, the beats, meters, and rhythms, the degrees of amplitude (pianissimo, piano, mezzo-piano, mezzo-forte, forte, fortissimo)? Though the majority go each day to the schools where these matters are taught, they read when time permits of Cape Canaveral, Ghana, and Seoul. And they’ve heard tell of the music synthesizer, magnetic tape. They take for granted the dials on radios and television sets. A tardy art, the art of Music. And why so slow? Is it because, once having learned a notation of pitches and durations, musicians will not give up their Greek? Children have been modern artists for years now. What is it about Music that sends not only the young but adults too as far into the past as they can conveniently go? The module? But our choices never reached around the globe, and in our laziness, when we changed over to the twelve-tone system, we just took the pitches of the previous music as though we were moving into a furnished apartment and had no time to even take the pictures off the walls. What excuse? That nowadays things are happening so quickly that we become thoughtless? Or were we clairvoyant and knew ahead of time that the need for furniture of any kind would disappear? (Whatever you place there in front of you sits established in the air.) The thing that was irrelevant to the structures we formerly made, and this was what kept us breathing, was what took place within them. Their emptiness we took for what it was – a place where anything could happen. That was one of the reasons we were able when circumstances became inviting (chances in consciousness, etc.) to go outside, where breathing is child’s play: no walls, not even the glass ones which, though we could see through them, killed the birds while they were flying.”

“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”

“Every something is an echo of nothing”

“Nothing more then nothing can be said.We make our lives by what we love.Being American, having been trained to be sentimental, I fought for noises … when the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds. There seemed to me to be no truth, no good, in anything big.Somebody asked Debussy how he wrote music. He said: “I take all the tones there are, leave out he one’s I don’t want, and use all the others”. Satie said: “When I was young, people told me; you’ll see when you’re fifty years old. Now I’m fifty. I’ve seen nothing”.Slowly as the talk goes on, we are getting nowhere – and that is a pleasure.It is not irritating to be where one is, it is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.If anybody is sleepy, let him go to sleep.All I know about method is that when I’m not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I’m working, it is quit clear I know nothing.”

“Things we were going to do are now being done by others. They were, it seems, not in our minds to do (were we or they out of our minds?) but simply ready to enter any open mind, any mind disturbed enough not to have an idea in it.”