Brian Eno's Quotes

I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.

I suppose I am reluctant about being any sort of 'star' and I didn't particularly want to be portrayed as one.

I take sounds and change them into words.

I think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being.

I think generally playing live is a crap idea. So much of stage work is the presentation of personality, and I've never been interested in that.

I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.

I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.

I want to rethink 'surrender' as an active verb.

I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.

I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.

I'm actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.

I'm bloody awful at multi-tasking.

I'm not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

I'm very opinionated.

I've got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.

I've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.

I've had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I've often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.

I've noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it's far enough in the future.

If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn't bother to find new ones.

If I tried to make a commercial album, it would be a complete flop. I have no idea what the world at large likes.

If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.

In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient - ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.

In my normal life I'm a very unadventurous person.

In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.

In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America.

It's actually very easy for democracy to disappear.

It's nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn't think of.

Law is always better than war.

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.

Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven't been made easier technically.

Most game music is based on loops effectively.

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don't fit in a very interesting way.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

My shows are not narratives.

Of course, like anybody I repeat myself endlessly, but I don't know that I'm doing it, usually.

Once you've grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you've inherited, you don't even notice it any longer.

One often makes music to supplement one's world.

Painting, I think it's like jazz.

People do dismiss ambient music, don't they? They call it 'easy listening,' as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.

Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.

Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.

Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!

Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.

The artists of the past who impressed me were the ones who really focused their work.

The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.

The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture.

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.

When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.

Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you're listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.

Well, there are some things that I just can't get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they're of my own creation, as well - and they're just as annoying. It's not only other people's ear worms that bug me, it's my own, as well.

When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks.'

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.

Everybody thinks that when new technologies come along that they're transparent and you can just do your job well on it. But technologies always import a whole new set of values with them.

I think most artists would be happy to have bigger audiences rather than smaller ones. It doesn't mean that they are going to change their work in order necessarily to get it, but they're happy if they do get it.

I'm very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.

Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun, and I think I'm sort of building up to doing something else quite soon.

Something I've realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we're smart about it.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

Every band I've worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they've gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

Every collaboration helps you grow. With Bowie, it's different every time. I know how to create settings, unusual aural environments. That inspires him. He's very quick.

For instance, I'm always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

For me it's always contingent on getting a sound-the sound always suggests what kind of melody it should be. So it's always sound first and then the line afterwards.

I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.

I know that if I had a television in my flat I would convince myself that everything on it was really interesting. I would say, 'I'm a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here!' is so sociologically fascinating that I think I'd better watch.

I love San Francisco and Brighton has something of San Francisco about it. It's by the sea, there's a big gay community, a feeling of people being there because they enjoy their life there.

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, 'What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?'

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

If you are part of a religion that very strongly insists that you believe then to decide not to do that is quite a big hurdle to jump over. You never forget the thought process you went through. It becomes part of your whole intellectual picture.

If you watch any good player, they're using different parts of their body and working with instruments that respond to those movements. They're moving in many dimensions at once.

If you're in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

If you've spent a long time developing a skill and techniques, and now some 14 year-old upstart can get exactly the same result, you might feel a bit miffed I suppose, but that has happened forever.

In the 19th century, a lot of people were against outlawing child labour, because to do so would be against the very foundations of a free market economy: 'These children want to work, these people want to employ them... what is your problem? It's not as if anyone has kidnapped them...'

Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.