Brian Eno Quotes

I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.

Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.

The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band

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.

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...'

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.

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

Everything is an experiment until it has a deadline. That gives it a destination, context, and a reason.

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.

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.

If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.

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

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.

American television really is pathetic.

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

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

Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.

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.

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.

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.

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

I often work by avoidance.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Every collaboration helps you grow.

I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another.

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.

The trouble with New Age music is that there's no evil in it.

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.

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.

In art, you CAN crash your plane and walk away from it

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

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.

I love good, loud speakers.

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.

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

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

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.

I believe in singing. I believe in singing together.

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

Everybody is entertained to death.

Don't be ashamed of your own ideas. Most musicians get applauded for sounding like someone else.

Good teachers realise that the students are the antenna; they are sensing things that the teachers don't yet sense.