Brian Eno Quotes
-
I'd love it if American kids were listening to Muslim music.
-
I've had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I've often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.
-
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.
-
Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better.
-
The computer brings out the worst in some people.
-
People always focus on people like me who use synthesizers, right, which are explicitly electronic and therefore obvious. "Ah, yes, that's electronic music." But they don't realize that so is the concept of actually taking a piece of extant music and literally re-collaging it, taking chunks out and changing the dynamics radically and creating new rhythmic structures with echo and all that. That's real electronic music, as far as I'm concerned.
-
The micro-compositions are the pieces themselves, but the macro-composition is the whole set of them and how it moves from track to track and how the titles relate to one another, for example. Always when I do records like this of a selection of instrumental pieces - the titles, to me, are very important.
-
The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.
-
Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That's what surfers do - take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we've become incredibly adept technically. We've treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part.
-
You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits, it keeps becoming something else.
-
Except in a few cases like Music for Airports, which was a very clear case of noticing a niche [and] saying, "Okay, there's this situation in which people always play music, and nobody has written music for that situation so I'm going to." So, that was a very clear example of spotting a niche and working for it. I have done that occasionally.
-
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.
-
One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.
-
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 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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
When I was working with Talking Heads what would happen typically is that they would go out and start playing a track, and I would always run the tape. I always record everything, even a run through where you're trying to get in tune. That's a principle because sometimes when the situation isn't clear interesting things happen, and they are worth listening to again.
-
Everything good proceeds from enthusiasm.
-
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.
-
'Two Voices,' from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and 'copied it out.'
-
Everything is an experiment until it has a deadline. That gives it a destination, context, and a reason.
-
Don't be ashamed of your own ideas. Most musicians get applauded for sounding like someone else.
-
The English don't like concepts, really, not from a pop star. It's alright if they come from an 'intellectual,', but from a pop star you're getting ahead of yourself. Part of the class game is that you shouldn't rise above your station, and to start talking about concepts if you're in the pop world is getting a bit uppity, isn't it?