Top 101 Brian Eno Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

Everybody is entertained to death.

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.

I’m bloody awful at multi-tasking.

I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness, and a better sense of humor.

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.

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

All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.

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.

I often work by avoidance.

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.

Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.

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

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?’

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 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.

The earliest paintings I loved were always the most non-referential paintings you can imagine, by painters such as Mondrian. I was thrilled by them because they didn’t refer to anything else. They stood alone, and they were just charged magic objects that did not get their strength from being connected to anything else.

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

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

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

It’s insane that, since the Beatles and Dylan, it’s assumed that all musicians should do everything themselves. It’s that ridiculous, teenage idea that when Mick Jagger sings, he’s telling you something about his own life. It’s so arrogant to think that people would want to know about it anyway!

A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn’t. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist.

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.

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

I do love being in my studio. Especially at night.

The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It’s fine to be a pop star. ‘Oh, it’s great, lots of fun, aren’t they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!’

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.

Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music – not like a record that you’d put on, which would play for a while and finish.

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

I often say to people that producing is the best-paid form of cowardice. When you produce things, you almost always get credit if it’s a good record, but you hardly ever get the blame if it’s not! You don’t really take responsibility for your work.

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.

In my normal life I’m a very unadventurous person.

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

When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings – to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

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

When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn’t about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind.

Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you’re listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.

The Marshall guitar amplifier doesn’t just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one.

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.

I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.

The way ‘Lux’ was made is that there are 12 sections in here, though two of them are joined together. So there are really 11 sections, in a sense, and each one uses five notes out of a palette of seven notes, and my palette is all the white notes on the piano. That was the original palette.

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

I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren’t historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

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

In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America.

I want to make something that is breathtaking. Of course, you can’t make something that is always breathtaking, or you would never be able to breathe. You would collapse.

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.

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

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.