Brian Eno quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Brian Eno

Brian Eno Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Brian Eno on Wise Famous Quotes.

Songs that don't depend on composition depend instead on performance - so the fire has to be there in the playing.

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

I'd rather hold one note for an hour and modulate it so that it means something than play 3,000 notes in 15 seconds.

Given the chance, i'll die like a baby, on some faraway beach, when the season's over.

Law is always better than war.

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.

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

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

The thing that obsesses me more than anything is waste - the waste of human intelligence and creativity.

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

Some people are very good at being 'stars' and it suits them. I'm grudging about it and I find it annoying.

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

The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.

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

People who are very confident in themselves aren't hurt by criticism. They make use of it.

I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.

Not many people bought Velvet Underground LPs, but those who did, started a band.

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

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

You can't really imagine music without technology.

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

Look closely at the most embarrassing details, and amplify them,

With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world.

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

I'm often accused of being ahead of my time, but it's simply not true. The truth is that everybody else is behind.

I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.

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.

Honour thy error as a hidden intention.

A big ego means that you have some confidence in your abilities, really, and that you're prepared to take the risk of trying them out.

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

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

I love good, loud speakers.

The idea that something is uncool because it's old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

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

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

Being an artist is a job for life.

I'm very opinionated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One often makes music to supplement one's world.

Most game music is based on loops effectively.

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

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

When people censor themselves they're just as likely to get rid of the good bits as the bad bits.

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

I'm bloody awful at multi-tasking.

I've never used a PC in my life; I don't like them.

You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits, it keeps becoming something else.

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

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.

I don't like celebrity programmes - but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.

Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.

I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me.

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.

I trust my taste. I trust it completely and I always have done, and I've always thought it isn't that different from everybody else's.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

You talk to me as if from a distance And I reply with impressions chosen from another time.

It's easy to forget that your best work is done when your attention is fully engaged.

Possessions are a way of turning money into problems.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.

I'm kind of an evangelical atheist.

Even though I'm known as a pop musician, I have a seriousness about what I do.

Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

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

One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

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

Also something that you don't have to listen to from beginning to end - you can enter at any point and leave at any point.

All music has political dimensions because it suggests a way of being.

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

Most people have no idea what something would sound like if it wasn't an MP3.

I've discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that's already there.

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

Ideas reflect the moment, and so you have to use them. If you store ideas, they wither.

I despise computers in many ways. I think they're hopelessly underevolved and overrated.

I'm a painter in sound.

Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better.

I often work by avoidance.

The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface.

A culture is the sum of all the things about which humanity can choose to differ.

Be the first to not do what nobody has ever thought of not doing before.

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

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

All the best lyrics are written in ten minutes.