Brian Eno Quotes

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

Brian Eno

#2. At the party, Rob Partridge said to me, "You gave hope to other balding men." My new epitaph: "Co-wrote a couple of decent songs and went bald shamelessly.

Brian Eno

#3. People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually.

Brian Eno

#4. 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.

Brian Eno

#5. As struggles go, being an artist isn't that much of one.

Brian Eno

#6. Sometimes something intrigues me about particular sounds, how they work together, and I think "Okay, I've found something here; I'm going to take it somewhere." And sometimes just to find a name for that sound, whatever it is, ends up becoming a title of the piece or becoming part of the title.

Brian Eno

#7. The reason I don't tour is that I don't know how to front a band. What would I do? I can't really play anything well enough to deal with that situation.

Brian Eno

#8. I do love being in my studio. Especially at night.

Brian Eno

#9. The reason conservatives cohere and radicals fight: everyone agrees about fears, no one about visions.

Brian Eno

#10. It's amazing how quickly people get used to bad quality.

Brian Eno

#11. When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.

Brian Eno

#12. I'm kind of an evangelical atheist.

Brian Eno

#13. My shows are not narratives.

Brian Eno

#14. I've always thought that art is a lie, an interesting lie. And I'll sort of listen to the "lie" and try to imagine the world which makes that lie true ... what that world must be like, and what would have to happen for us to get from this world to that one.

Brian Eno

#15. Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.

Brian Eno

#16. Honor your mistake as a hidden intention.

Brian Eno

#17. I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, 'Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!'

Brian Eno

#18. Of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do?

Brian Eno

#19. 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.

Brian Eno

#20. Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's inevitable.

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

#23. I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.

Brian Eno

#24. When I finish something, I want it out that day. Pop music is like the daily paper. Its got to be there then, not six months later.

Brian Eno

#25. 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.

Brian Eno

#26. American television really is pathetic.

Brian Eno

#27. Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is.

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

#29. All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.

Brian Eno

#30. I think I've committed the one really bad English crime, which is I've risen above my station. I was supposed to be a pop star, and suddenly I'm claiming that I'm an artist of some kind.

Brian Eno

#31. The computer brings out the worst in some people.

Brian Eno

#32. I'd love it if American kids were listening to Muslim music.

Brian Eno

#33. What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest - the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.

Brian Eno

#34. I have these headphones, which pretty much exclude everything else so that you can really completely control the sound that you're hearing. I don't use them very much, I have to say. I very rarely listen on headphones.

Brian Eno

#35. One of the things you're doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

Brian Eno

#36. You either believe that people respond to authority, or that they respond to kindness and inclusion. I'm obviously in the latter camp. I think that people respond better to reward than punishment.

Brian Eno

#37. I do like Burial; he's so curiously clumsy, you can't help but be moved. It's so un-Hollywood, and the rhythms are so un-danceable.

Brian Eno

#38. The trouble begins with a design philosophy that equates 'more options' with 'greater freedom.'

Brian Eno

#39. Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.

Brian Eno

#40. Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

Brian Eno

#41. A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.

Brian Eno

#42. Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.

Brian Eno

#43. With recording, everything changed. 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. It's an idea that many composers have felt reluctant about because it seemed to them to diminish the importance of music.

Brian Eno

#44. 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.

Brian Eno

#45. 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.

Brian Eno

#46. You feel as if you're not living a full life. Which, of course, is why it's my theory about why so many people who are heavily into computers are also into extreme sports and S&M. It's because their bodies are crying out for some kind of action.

Brian Eno

#47. Try to make things that can become better in other people's minds than they were in yours.

Brian Eno

#48. 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.

Brian Eno

#49. Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material ... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

#51. One often makes music to supplement one's world.

Brian Eno

#52. The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you're apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times.

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

#54. We're going through this super-uptight era, which I think comes entirely from literacy, actually. It's the result of machines that were designed as word processors being used for making music.

Brian Eno

#55. I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.

Brian Eno

#56. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.

Brian Eno

#57. Instruments sound interesting, not because of their sound, but because of the relationship a player has with them. Instrumentalists build a rapport with their instruments, which is what you like and respond to.

Brian Eno

#58. I think that there's something that I still like about the fact of a package, like the latest report from somebody. "Okay, this is what they're up to now; this is what they're doing; who's working with them?".

Brian Eno

#59. Culture is everything you don't have to do.

Brian Eno

#60. Look closely at the most embarrassing details, and amplify them,

Brian Eno

#61. Put out as much as you can. It doesn't do anything sitting on a shelf.

Brian Eno

#62. Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.

Brian Eno

#63. I love the sort of ambivalence of this, the ambiguity of something being, for instance, in a quite busy Mexican restaurant with one of these very gentle tracks playing I remember as being particularly nice.

Brian Eno

#64. Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience.

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

#66. As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.

Brian Eno

#67. It infuriates me that stuff from the Internet routinely doesn't include all the credits. Because as soon as I listen to something, if I like it, I want to know, "Who's the bass player?" "Who did that?" "Who's the engineer on this?"

Brian Eno

#68. I think very often producers are really trying to repeat things. When they hear something in the new songs that they recognize as being a bit like something that was a success on a previous record, they're inclined to encourage that.

Brian Eno

#69. As soon as you externalize an idea you see facets of it that weren't clear when it was just floating around in your head.

Brian Eno

#70. 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.

Brian Eno

#71. You can't do anything interesting with cutting-edge technology except not make it cutting-edge.

Brian Eno

#72. Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness.

Brian Eno

#73. 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.

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

#75. The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface.

Brian Eno

#76. The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can.

Brian Eno

#77. A studio is an absolute labyrinth of possibilities - this is why records take so long to make because there are millions of permutations of things you can do. The most useful thing you can do is to get rid of some of those options before you start

Brian Eno

#78. I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.

Brian Eno

#79. Genius is individual, scenius is communal.

Brian Eno

#80. Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.

Brian Eno

#81. There is a sort of convergence starting to happen between the computer and musical instruments, but it's still quite a long way off.

Brian Eno

#82. Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.

Brian Eno

#83. Most big concerts sound disgusting and awful and insultingly bad. It's like going to the cinema and been shown a scratchy film which is upsidedown and the bulb had gone on the projector. The quality of large-scale live music is so shocking.

Brian Eno

#84. 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.

Brian Eno

#85. I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity.

Brian Eno

#86. I believe in singing.

Brian Eno

#87. The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz.

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

#89. It's not the destination that matters. It's the change of scene.

Brian Eno

#90. I cant duplicate my own successes, because part of the creation of that effect is making something happen that you didn't expect

Brian Eno

#91. I remember when in the early days of rock'n'roll, when everything sounded totally different, all amazing and blah blah blah blah blah. Now you can play me one second of any record from that time, and I'll say "1959" or "1961." I can hear precisely. It's like it has a huge date stamp on it.

Brian Eno

#92. I hate the way CDs just drone on for bloody hours and you stop caring.

Brian Eno

#93. You don't have to act as if you know what you're doing

Brian Eno

#94. I think the idea that people walk around to music is very interesting. They are actually creating the soundtrack to their lives as they walk around to it.

Brian Eno

#95. It must be quite mysterious to some people why I bother to carry on. Because, you know, I don't sell that many records.

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

#97. My interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to. I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist.

Brian Eno

#98. Nothing so dates an era as its conception of the future.

Brian Eno

#99. 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.

Brian Eno

#100. John Cage made you realise that there wasn't a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn't appreciated.

Brian Eno