Brian Eno Quotes & Sayings

I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked. — Brian Eno

I had an interesting day. I was in the studio with a group of musicians, who shall remain nameless, and I said to them "Our exercise today is not to use 'undo' at all. So, there's no second takes. Or, if you do a second take, you have to do the whole take. There's no sort of drop in, change that little bit". The session broke down in, I'd say, 40 minutes. It was impossible for people to work in that restriction any longer. — Brian Eno

You can't really imagine music without technology. — Brian Eno

I cant duplicate my own successes, because part of the creation of that effect is making something happen that you didn't expect — Brian Eno

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.' — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

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

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. — Brian Eno

I'm an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call 'the last illusion.' The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what's going on but that the planets know what's going on. — Brian Eno

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before. — Brian Eno

Democracy is a daring concept - a hope that we'll be best governed if all of us participate in the act of government. It is meant to be a conversation, a place where the intelligence and local knowledge of the electorate sums together to arrive at actions that reflect the participation of the largest possible number of people. — Brian Eno

I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn't want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. 'Discreet Music' was like that, and 'Music for Airports.' What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out. — Brian Eno

I hate the way CDs just drone on for bloody hours and you stop caring. — Brian Eno

So I believe in singing to such an extent that if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing become a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for co-operation with others. This seems to be about the most important thing a school could do for you. — Brian Eno

Complexity and intelligence grow from simplicity, not from greater complexity. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

I've discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that's already there. — Brian Eno

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

It's actually very easy for democracy to disappear. — Brian Eno

I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming. — Brian Eno

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? — Brian Eno

I have these headphones, which pretty much exclude everything else so that you can really completely control the sound that you're hearing. I don't use them very much, I have to say. I very rarely listen on headphones. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

Honor your mistake as a hidden intention. — Brian Eno

Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations. — Brian Eno

I'm often accused of being ahead of my time, but it's simply not true. The truth is that everybody else is behind. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

Basically, you're still sitting there using just the muscles of your hand, really. Of one hand, actually. It's another example of the transfer of literacy to making music because the assumption is that everything important is happening in your head; the muscles are there simply to serve the head. But that isn't how traditional players work at all; musicians know that their muscles have a lot of stuff going on as well. They're using their whole body to make music, in fact. — Brian Eno

Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive. — Brian Eno

Well, there are some things that I just can't get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they're of my own creation, as well - and they're just as annoying. It's not only other people's ear worms that bug me, it's my own, as well. — Brian Eno

Something I've realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we're smart about it. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

Law is always better than war. — Brian Eno

The trouble begins with a design philosophy that equates 'more options' with 'greater freedom.' — Brian Eno

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when - and he won't necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

I'm a painter in sound. — Brian Eno

We have two different ways of working. One is completely unstructured where somebody just starts playing and somebody joins in and then the other person joins in, and something starts to happen. That's occasionally what happens. What more often happens is that we settle on some sort of a few sort of structural ideas, like, "Okay, when I put my finger up, we're all going to move to the extremes of our instruments. So, that means you can only play either very high or very low or both. And we're going to stay there until I take my finger down." — Brian Eno

It's nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn't think of. — Brian Eno

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

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

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. — Brian Eno

There is a sort of convergence starting to happen between the computer and musical instruments, but it's still quite a long way off. — Brian Eno

I wouldn't call myself a synaesthete in the sense that Nabokov was. But I'll talk about a sound as being cold blue or dark brown. For descriptive purposes, yes, I often see colors when I'm listening to music and think, 'Oh, there's not enough sort of yellowy stuff in here, or not enough white.' — Brian Eno

Think inside the work - outside the work — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art. — Brian Eno

I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do. — Brian Eno

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

I do love being in my studio. Especially at night. — Brian Eno

What I believe is that people have many modes in which they can be. When we live in cities, the one we are in most of the time is the alert mode. The 'take control of things' mode, the 'be careful, watch out' mode, the 'speed' mode - the 'Red Bull' mode, actually. There's nothing wrong with it. It's all part of what we are. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

The computer brings out the worst in some people. — Brian Eno

The thing that obsesses me more than anything is waste - the waste of human intelligence and creativity. — Brian Eno

I've never used a PC in my life; I don't like them. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you're apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

For instance, I'm always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before. — Brian Eno

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

Possessions are a way of turning money into problems. — Brian Eno

All music has political dimensions because it suggests a way of being. — Brian Eno

The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface. — Brian Eno

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

I don't like celebrity programmes - but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve. — Brian Eno

Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

It's amazing how quickly people get used to bad quality. — Brian Eno

The tools are evolving, and people's interests are evolving as well. So, suddenly people like to hear bands, people like Devendra Banhart or the xx, bands that make a kind of virtue of sloppiness. That isn't what they would describe what they're doing, but the fact is they make a virtue of the sort of hand-made nature of what they're doing. — Brian Eno

I'd love it if American kids were listening to Muslim music. — Brian Eno

I often work by avoidance. — Brian Eno

It infuriates me that stuff from the Internet routinely doesn't include all the credits. Because as soon as I listen to something, if I like it, I want to know, "Who's the bass player?" "Who did that?" "Who's the engineer on this?" — Brian Eno

I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world. — Brian Eno

I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another. — Brian Eno

I used to think that, given enough goodwill, anybody would be able to 'get' any music, no matter how distant the culture from which it came. And then I heard Chinese opera. — Brian Eno

Being completely free to choose what to do is actually quite difficult — Brian Eno

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

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. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

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

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. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

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

In art, you CAN crash your plane and walk away from it — Brian Eno

I think the idea that people walk around to music is very interesting. They are actually creating the soundtrack to their lives as they walk around to it. — Brian Eno

When I've finally got the title, I think, "Okay, yes, now I know where we are. Now I know what it is. Fine, that must be finished or nearly finished." — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

Even though I'm known as a pop musician, I have a seriousness about what I do. — Brian Eno

I describe things in terms of body movements. I dance a bit to describe what sort of movement it ought to make, and that's a good way of talking to musicians. Particularly bass players. — Brian Eno

Also something that you don't have to listen to from beginning to end - you can enter at any point and leave at any point. — Brian Eno

I wanted to use the studio like a microscope for sound, which is what good engineers do. — Brian Eno

Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience. — Brian Eno

Often, I think you find that you're enjoying certain things, you've got this new way of listening, and you find that you really enjoy the way that sounds on it and the way this other thing sounds on it and the way that other thing sounds on it. So, you're finding a new pleasure that you didn't know about before. — Brian Eno

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, 'Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!' — Brian Eno

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.' — Brian Eno

The big message of gospel is that you don't have to keep fighting the universe; you can stop, and the universe is quite good to you. There is a loss of ego. — Brian Eno