Brian Eno Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

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.

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

I take sounds and change them into words.

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

The reason I don’t tour is that I don’t know how to front a band. What would I do? I can’t really play anything well enough to deal with that situation.

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

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.

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.

Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun, and I think I’m sort of building up to doing something else quite soon.

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.

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

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

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.

Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.

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

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.

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

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

When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

It must be quite mysterious to some people why I bother to carry on. Because, you know, I don’t sell that many records.

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.

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.

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 make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs.

Everybody thinks that when new technologies come along that they’re transparent and you can just do your job well on it. But technologies always import a whole new set of values with them.

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

In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient – ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.

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

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

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.

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

I believe in singing.

If you’ve spent a long time developing a skill and techniques, and now some 14 year-old upstart can get exactly the same result, you might feel a bit miffed I suppose, but that has happened forever.

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.

Law is always better than war.

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

I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.

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.

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

If you are part of a religion that very strongly insists that you believe then to decide not to do that is quite a big hurdle to jump over. You never forget the thought process you went through. It becomes part of your whole intellectual picture.

I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.

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

My shows are not narratives.

I want to rethink ‚surrender‘ as an active verb.

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