Brian Eno Quotes

I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity.

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

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

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

I don't live in the past at all; I'm always wanting to do something new. I make a point of constantly trying to forget and get things out of my mind.

You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.

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

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

I have a definite talent for convincing people to try something new. I am a good salesman. When I'm on form, I can sell anything.

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

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

The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.

Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.

You either believe that people respond to authority, or that they respond to kindness and inclusion. I'm obviously in the latter camp. I think that people respond better to reward than punishment.

Cooking is a way of listening to the radio.

I'm very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.

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

One often makes music to supplement one's world.

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

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

The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.

The reason conservatives cohere and radicals fight: everyone agrees about fears, no one about visions.

People do dismiss ambient music, don't they? They call it 'easy listening,' as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.

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

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.

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.

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

Law is always better than war.

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

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

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

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

In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.

Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren't susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.

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

There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.

I'm bloody awful at multi-tasking.

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 always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It's still got the same strings on it.

I think generally playing live is a crap idea. So much of stage work is the presentation of personality, and I've never been interested in that.

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don't fit in a very interesting way.

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

Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.

Complexity and intelligence grow from simplicity, not from greater complexity.

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

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

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn't if you knew better.