Silence: Lectures and Writings

John Cage is the outstanding composer of avant-garde music today. The Saturday Review said of him: "Cage possesses one of the rarest qualities of the true creator- that of an original mind- and whether that originality pleases, irritates, amuses or outrages is irrelevant." "He refuses to sermonize or pontificate. What John Cage offers is more refreshing, more spirited, much more fun-a kind of carefree skinny-dipping in the infinite. It's what's happening now." -The American Record Guide

"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. Sounds occur whether intended or not; the psychological turning in direction of those not intended seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity. But one must see that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together, that nothing was lost when everything was given away."

• Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists
• Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice
• The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
• Grapefruit
• Give My Regards To Eighth Street (Exact Change)
• Composition in Retrospect
• The Music of John Cage (Music in the Twentieth Century)
• A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings
• Interviews with Francis Bacon
• John Cage: Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)