1.
I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.
Brian Eno
2.
Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
Brian Eno
3.
Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.
Brian Eno
4.
The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band
Brian Eno
5.
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
6.
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...'
Brian Eno
7.
My guitar only has five strings 'cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there.
Brian Eno
8.
Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.
Brian Eno
9.
Everything is an experiment until it has a deadline. That gives it a destination, context, and a reason.
Brian Eno
10.
Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research.
Brian Eno
11.
Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
Brian Eno
12.
If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.
Brian Eno
13.
Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
Brian Eno
14.
I felt extremely uncomfortable as the focal point, in the spotlight. I really like the behind the scenes role, because all my freedom is there.
Brian Eno
15.
American television really is pathetic.
Brian Eno
16.
The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.
Brian Eno
17.
Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.
Brian Eno
18.
Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.
Brian Eno
19.
Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.
Brian Eno
20.
If there is a new fascism, it won't come from skinheads and punks; it will come from people who eat granola and think they know how the world should be.
Brian Eno
21.
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
22.
I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
Brian Eno
23.
I often work by avoidance.
Brian Eno
24.
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
25.
If you had a sign above every studio door saying ‘This Studio is a Musical Instrument’ it would make such a different approach to recording.
Brian Eno
26.
Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven't been made easier technically.
Brian Eno
27.
Whenever you listen to a piece of music, what you are actually doing is hearing the latest sentence in a very long story you’ve been listening to - all the pieces of music you’ve ever heard.
Brian Eno
28.
I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.
Brian Eno
29.
I'd love it if American kids were listening to Muslim music.
Brian Eno
30.
I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.
Brian Eno
31.
My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when - and he won't necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.
Brian Eno
32.
Every collaboration helps you grow.
Brian Eno
33.
I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another.
Brian Eno
34.
We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
Brian Eno
35.
The trouble with New Age music is that there's no evil in it.
Brian Eno
36.
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
37.
The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.
Brian Eno
38.
In art, you CAN crash your plane and walk away from it
Brian Eno
39.
The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.
Brian Eno
40.
You can hear the profile of a sound, in retrospect, so much more clearly than you did at the time. And I think one of the things that's going to be nauseatingly characteristic about so much music of now is its glossy production values and its griddedness, the tightness of the way everything is locked together.
Brian Eno
41.
I love good, loud speakers.
Brian Eno
42.
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
43.
A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.
Brian Eno
44.
If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.
Brian Eno
45.
The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.
Brian Eno
46.
I believe in singing. I believe in singing together.
Brian Eno
47.
The computer brings out the worst in some people.
Brian Eno
48.
Everybody is entertained to death.
Brian Eno
49.
Don't be ashamed of your own ideas. Most musicians get applauded for sounding like someone else.
Brian Eno
50.
Good teachers realise that the students are the antenna; they are sensing things that the teachers don't yet sense.
Brian Eno
