Eno Quotes & Sayings

Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's inevitable. — Brian Eno

Most big concerts sound disgusting and awful and insultingly bad. It's like going to the cinema and been shown a scratchy film which is upsidedown and the bulb had gone on the projector. The quality of large-scale live music is so shocking. — Brian Eno

Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is. — 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'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet. — Brian Eno

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

Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting. — Brian Eno

Brian Eno developed systems to keep himself on edge and to keep himself in a position where he's generating ideas. — Jon Brion

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

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

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important. — Brian Eno

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

Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it. — Brian Eno

Ideas reflect the moment, and so you have to use them. If you store ideas, they wither. — 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

People who are very confident in themselves aren't hurt by criticism. They make use of it. — Brian Eno

I am a big Brian Eno fan - the first few Brian Eno records are just absolute gibberish and he came up with a lot of lyrics by writing down loads and loads of random sentences and streams, and I find meaning in that music, even though he'd probably say it's absolute gibberish. — Jay Watson

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

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

What people call unemotional just doesnt have a single overriding emotion to it. The things that I like best are the ones that ambiguous on the emotional level. — Brian Eno

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

I love good, loud speakers. — Brian Eno

In my normal life I'm a very unadventurous person. — Brian Eno

Nothing so dates an era as its conception of the future. — 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

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. — Brian Eno

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

If you want to make computers that really work, create a design team composed only of healthy, active women with lots else to do in their lives, and give them carte blanche. — Brian Eno

I'm kind of an evangelical atheist. — 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

Honour thy error as a hidden intention. — Brian Eno

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

I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones. — Brian Eno

I've always thought that art is a lie, an interesting lie. And I'll sort of listen to the "lie" and try to imagine the world which makes that lie true ... what that world must be like, and what would have to happen for us to get from this world to that one. — Brian Eno

A culture is the sum of all the things about which humanity can choose to differ. — Brian Eno

You talk to me as if from a distance And I reply with impressions chosen from another time. — 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

Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material ... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time. — Brian Eno

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

So I wanted to write a play that put some thoughts and feelings in the air about the miracle and the mystery and that alluded to deep and unknown forces. But then really just have people going to the store and fixing the sink and going through the normal things of looking for love and getting up in the morning. Because that's how we live. — Will Eno

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. — Brian Eno

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

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

Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. — Brian Eno

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.' — Brian Eno

When people censor themselves they're just as likely to get rid of the good bits as the bad bits. — Brian Eno

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

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

Software options proliferate extremely easily - too easily, in fact - because too many options create tools that can't ever be used intuitively. Intuitive actions confine the detail work to a dedicated part of the brain, leaving the rest of one's mind free to respond with attention and sensitivity to the changing texture of the moment. — 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

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time. — Brian Eno

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

You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits, it keeps becoming something else. — Brian Eno

I love music/sounds that have a passion, a fire, an energy I can connect with. I love angry sounding beat tracks, dark sounds for sure but I also love delicate sounds, they both connect I think. Discharge back in 1980 was a big explosion in sound for me to hear the anger and the energy, still an influence on me. Miles Davis has been an influence, as much as John Coltrane, Brian Eno, John Hassel. So much around me has influenced me: my everyday life, everything around me, the family, etc ... It has an impact. — Mick Harris

I'm very opinionated. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

Attention is what creates value. Artworks are made as well by how people interact with them - and therefore by what quality of interaction they can inspire. — 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

The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

I often work by avoidance. — Brian Eno

I think I've committed the one really bad English crime, which is I've risen above my station. I was supposed to be a pop star, and suddenly I'm claiming that I'm an artist of some kind. — Brian Eno

I think I sent one [book] to Brian Eno. I don't know how I got to know his address, but I sent one to him. He called me up and he said, "I really like the book, and I'm starting a new label, would you liked to do something?" It was a tricky situation for me, because I've always had this thing in my life of a tension between collaboration, which was extremely important to me, and then being alone. Make of that what you will! — David Toop

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. — Brian Eno

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that. — Brian Eno

Some people are very good at being 'stars' and it suits them. I'm grudging about it and I find it annoying. — Brian Eno

John Cage made you realise that there wasn't a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn't appreciated. — 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

To be completely honest, I think if I hadn't been bullied into the band, I would have been happier as an art student. I would have been happier in a Brian Eno world. — Pete Townshend

One night, I pissed into an empty wine bottle so I could continue watching Monty Python, and suddenly thought 'I've never tasted my own piss,' so I drank a little. It looked just like Orvieto Classico and tasted of nearly nothing — Brian Eno

I still do mostly listen to CDs. I think that every format really is a different way of listening. If you take a different sort of psychological stance to it - like, I think the transition from vinyl to CD definitely marked a difference in the way people treated music. The vinyl commands a certain kind of reverence because it's a big object and quite fragile so you handle it rather carefully, and it's expensive so you pay attention to how it's looked after. — Brian Eno

I would love to be looked at some day - and I'm not ever saying I'm at this level - but I'd love to be mentioned in the same breath as a Bowie or an Eno. Those are the people that I admire artistically, their career trajectory, the integrity throughout their career, the bravery of their career. — Trent Reznor

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

Not many people bought Velvet Underground LPs, but those who did, started a band. — Brian Eno

Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism. — 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

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

It seemed as if Muzak had sucked the soul out of the songs, but in fact they had created something entirely new, something close to what Satie imagined: furniture music, music that was clearly a useful and (to their subscribers) functional part of the environment, there to induce calm and tranquility in their shops and offices. Why is it that Satie's compositions, Brian Eno's ambient music, or the minimal spaced-out — David Byrne

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. — 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

Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do & do the last thing on the list. — Brian Eno

I love San Francisco and Brighton has something of San Francisco about it. It's by the sea, there's a big gay community, a feeling of people being there because they enjoy their life there. — Brian Eno

One often makes music to supplement one's world. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

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. — 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

You feel as if you're not living a full life. Which, of course, is why it's my theory about why so many people who are heavily into computers are also into extreme sports and S&M. It's because their bodies are crying out for some kind of action. — Brian Eno

When I finish something, I want it out that day. Pop music is like the daily paper. Its got to be there then, not six months later. — Brian Eno

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

For me it's always contingent on getting a sound-the sound always suggests what kind of melody it should be. So it's always sound first and then the line afterwards. — Brian Eno

Don't be ashamed of your own ideas. Most musicians get applauded for sounding like someone else. — 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

You don't have to act as if you know what you're doing — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

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

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. — Brian Eno

Pop music can absorb so many peculiar talents, ranging from the completely nonmusical poseur who just uses music as a kind of springboard for a sense of style, to people who just love putting all that complicated stuff together, brick by brick, on their computers, to people like me who like playing conceptual games and being surprised. — Brian Eno

I always have wanted to know how the whole thing was done, what the process involved. And I don't particularly enjoy that my music is stripped of ancillary details, and it just sort of comes out of this big tap called the Internet like water. I like some of my water to be neatly presented in a bottle.With a label on it. — Brian Eno