Brian Eno Quotes

I hate the rock music tradition. I can't bear it!

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.

There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.

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.

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.

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

Listening to something is an act of surrender.

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

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

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn't if you knew better.

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

Complexity and intelligence grow from simplicity, not from greater complexity.

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.

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn't bother to find new ones.

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.

Sometimes you recognize that there is a category of human experience that has not been identified but everyone knows about it. That is when I find a term to describe it.

Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun.

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

In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.

Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!

I'm bloody awful at multi-tasking.

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 see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.

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.

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.

I'm very opinionated.

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.

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

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.

The most important thing in a piece of music is to seduce people to the point where they start searching.

Everything good proceeds from enthusiasm.

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.

The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them.

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

As soon as you externalize an idea you see facets of it that weren't clear when it was just floating around in your head.

I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.

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

Think inside the work - outside the work

I take sounds and change them into words.

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.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that sounds like a definition of pop to me.

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

I'm kind of an evangelical atheist.

I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet.

You can't really imagine music without technology.

W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you.

Be the first to not do what nobody has ever thought of not doing before.

One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.