Brian Eno Quotes

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.'

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

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

I suppose I am reluctant about being any sort of 'star' and I didn't particularly want to be portrayed as one.

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.

The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

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.

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

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.

One of the things you're doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.

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.

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of 'what else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?'

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.

Being an artist is a job for life.

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.

The artists of the past who impressed me were the ones who really focused their work.

Songs that don't depend on composition depend instead on performance - so the fire has to be there in the playing.

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

The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface.

More and more I find I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now.

If you've spent a long time developing a skill and techniques, and now some 14 year-old upstart can get exactly the same result, you might feel a bit miffed I suppose, but that has happened forever.

I think, if you spend a day or - as many people do - a life working only with that aspect of your being, the cerebrum connected to a finger, I feel that the rest of you atrophies, essentially.

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.

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.

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

A big ego isn't necessarily a bad thing. A big ego means that you have some confidence in your abilities, really, and that you're prepared to take the risk of trying them out.

I'm always interested in something when it isn't familiar to me.

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.

You have 62 people worth the amount the bottom three and a half billion people are worth. Sixty-two people! You could put them all in one bloody bus… then crash it!

Honor your mistake as a hidden intention.

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.

I don't live in the past at all I'm always wanting to do something new. I make a point of constantly trying to forget and get things out of my mind.

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.

I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me.

I trust my taste. I trust it completely and I always have done, and I've always thought it isn't that different from everybody else's.

I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet. I think that's sort of a characteristic of the way I've worked ever since I started.

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