Brian Eno Quotes

I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.

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.

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it's done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

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

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

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

I take sounds and change them into words.

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.

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

Law is always better than war.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

In terms of what has been happening recently, there have been, I think, some really interesting new instruments that have come out that sort of show me the direction of the future. Korg has introduced the - they've had a whole series now of these things called Kaoss Pads. They're wonderful because they do get your muscles working again. And what DJs do, of course, with their DJ turntables now, the CD turntables, which have pitch change and speed change and everything else. They're doing something that I think is interestingly physical.

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 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.

The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them.

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

Everybody is entertained to death.

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.

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.

Whenever there's a new music, there's a new way of listening. And whenever there's a new way of listening, there are new musics that follow from that. And people start listening differently - that can either mean in different places or at different volumes or in different social groups or through different technologies.

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

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

I mostly used the studio devices, because I knew what they had. Generally I find I'm happy to use whatever's around. If there's nothing there I'll make something. For example, one of the things I tried doing was getting a tiny loudspeaker and feeding the instruments off the tape through this tiny speaker and then through this huge long plastic tube - about 50 feet long - that they used to clean out the swimming pool in the place where I was staying. You get this really hollow, cavernous, weird sound, a very nice sound. We didn't use it finally, but nonetheless we well could have.

Being completely free to choose what to do is actually quite difficult

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

Cultural objects have no notable identity outside of that which we confer upon them. Their value is entirely a product of the interaction that we have with them.

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

What people call unemotional just doesnt have a single overriding emotion to it. The things that I like best are the ones that ambiguous on the emotional level.

I'm bloody awful at multi-tasking.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet.

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

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.

There are hundreds of manufacturers always producing dvices that in general do the same things. Since they have slight structural differences if you take one and fool around with it and give it a good kick it will actually do something that it wasn't designed to do. I have this relationship with my synthesizers. I've had them for so long, and I've never had them serviced, so that now practically all of their functions operate differently from what they were designed to do. They do very interesting things now, but that means nobody else can use them either.

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.

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.

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

I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.

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.

W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you.

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.

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

I got an amazing 10-CD set, it's the music that Alan Lomax recorded in Haiti in 1936. And what's incredible is how fantastic the drummers are and how off-the-grid they are. The liveliness is astonishing; they're just totally alive, these recordings. It's very interesting, to me, to be reminded of that, that there was a time when things were not that tight.

More and more I find I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now.