Brian Eno Quotes
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I don't like celebrity programmes - but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.
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The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz.
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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.
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I'm often accused of being ahead of my time, but it's simply not true. The truth is that everybody else is behind.
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Although designers continue to dream of 'transparency' - technologies that just do their job without making their presence felt - both creators and audiences actually like technologies with 'personality.'
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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.
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A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.
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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.
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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.
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We're going through this super-uptight era, which I think comes entirely from literacy, actually. It's the result of machines that were designed as word processors being used for making music.
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I've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.
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Instead of shooting arrows at someone elses target, which Ive never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.
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When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks.'
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Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on - including your own incompetence.
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My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.
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Painting, I think it's like jazz.
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With recording, everything changed. The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture. It's an idea that many composers have felt reluctant about because it seemed to them to diminish the importance of music.
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I despise computers in many ways. I think they’re hopelessly underevolved and overrated.
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I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
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In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.
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Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.
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My guitar only has five strings 'cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there.
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The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.
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The problem with improvisation is, of course, that everyone just slips into their comfort zone and does sort of the easy thing to do, the most obvious thing to do with your instrument.