Brian Eno Quotes

I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.

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

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

I describe things in terms of body movements. I dance a bit to describe what sort of movement it ought to make, and that's a good way of talking to musicians. Particularly bass players.

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

If you think of the way a composer or say a pop arranger works - he has an idea and he writes it down, so there's one transmission loss. Then he gives the score to a group of musicians who interpret that, so there's another transmission loss. So he's involved with three information losses. Whereas what I nearly always do is work directly to the sound if it doesn't sound right. So there's a continuous loop going on.

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...'

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

A big ego isn't necessarily a bad thing. 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.

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

Sometimes you recognize that there is a category of human experience that has not been identified but everyone knows about it. That is when I find a term to describe it.

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

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.

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.

When you make something you are always offering some choices and denying others.

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of 'what else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?'

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.

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

I wish there was a serious investigation into flying saucers that wasn't conducted by crackpots. Unfortunately nearly all of the people who are interested in them kind of manufacture the evidence to fit the theories rather than the other way around. So it's very hard to find any dispassionate treatment of them. Maybe there isn't any scientific basis in which case that's why you never see any scientific evidence.

Being an artist is a job for life.

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.

I think that's very significant that we're so attached to the idea now of - it was something I advocated for years, that you can make music in studios, music doesn't have to be made as a real-time experience. But now you see the results of that in people who are completely crippled unless they know that they have the possibility of "cut and paste" and "undo." And "undo" and "undo" and "undo" and "undo" and "undo" again.

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.

If you watch any good player, they're using different parts of their body and working with instruments that respond to those movements. They're moving in many dimensions at once.

I hate the thought that someone had picked up one of my song records and was really excited about it, and walks [out of] a record shop with On Land and is disappointed because it isn't what they wanted. So, I try to make signs, graphically and visually, to say to people "Okay, this is this department of my work and this is this other department of my work." And of course I'm very pleased if people like all of them, but I don't want them to feel deceived at any point.

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

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

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

Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that sounds like a definition of pop to me.

Another way of working is setting deliberate constraints that aren't musical ones - like saying, "Well, this piece is going to be three minutes and nineteen seconds long and it's going to have changes here, here and here, and there's going to be a convolution of events here, and there's going to be a very fast rhythm here with a very slow moving part over the top of it." Those are the sort of visual ideas that I can draw out on graph paper. I've done a lot of film music this way.

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.

I do sometimes look back at things I've written in the past, and think, 'I just don't remember being the person who wrote that.'

I wanted to use the studio like a microscope for sound, which is what good engineers do.

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

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.

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

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.

One way of working is just bring a group of totally different musicians together and encourage them to stick to their guns, not to do the thing that normally happens in a working situation where everyone homogenizes and concedes certain points - so eventually they're all playing in roughly the same style. I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away. So there would be a kind of space in the middle where I could operate, and attempt to make these things coalesce in some way. In fact quite a lot of my stuff has arisen from that.

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

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

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.

Things that are very popular are not taken seriously, because the snobbish side of one says, "Well, if everyone likes it it can't be that good." Whereas if only I and a couple of other people like it, then it must be really something special.