“I think society is one of the greatest impediments an artist can possibly have. I rather think that Duchamp concurred with this view. When I was young and needed help, society wouldn’t give it, because it had no confidence in what I was doing. But when, through my perseverance, society took an interest, then it wanted me not to do the next thing, but to repeat what I had done before. At every point society acts to keep you from doing what you have to do.”
— John Cage
From an interview published in: Moira Roth, Difference/Indifference: musings on postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V., Amsterdam, 1998, p. 72.