Eno Quotes

Put out as much as you can. It doesn't do anything sitting on a shelf. ~ Brian Eno

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 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. ~ 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

Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop. ~ Brian Eno

You can't do anything interesting with cutting-edge technology except not make it cutting-edge. ~ 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

It must be quite mysterious to some people why I bother to carry on. Because, you know, I don't sell that many records. ~ Brian Eno

There's a kind of edge to what you're doing, the kind of leading edge of what you're doing. Inside that edge [are elements you] are familiar with, and are probably becoming slightly bored with, as well, over a period of time. "I've pulled that one out before. Oh, no, I can't I'm just fed up with that. Let's do something else."And you always think "Oh my God I've never done anything at all like that before." But, of course, in retrospect, and to an outsider, they'll say, "Oh, yeah that's typical Eno." ~ Brian Eno

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

I'm fascinated by musicians who don't completely understand their territory; that's when you do your best work. ~ Brian Eno

When you build a building, you finish a building. You don't finish a garden; you start it, and then it carries on with its life. So my analogy was really to say that we composers or some of us should think of ourselves as people who start processes rather than finish them. And there might be surprises. ~ Brian Eno

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

Some people are better at seeing things through to a logical conclusion as far as copying things they like from other people's records; they understand what Brian Eno did and they just do it. ~ Alexis Taylor

I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity. ~ Brian Eno

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

'Two Voices,' from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and 'copied it out.' ~ 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

Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations. ~ 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 had grown up on Folkway's Nonesuch field recordings and the stuff Lomax had done for the Library of Congress, but the production values on the Ocora releases were on a whole other level. Eno and I realized that music from elsewhere didn't need to sound distant, scratchy, or 'primitive.' These recordings were as well produced as any contemporary recordings in any genre. You were made to feel, for example, that this music wasn't a ghostly remnant form some lost culture, soon to be relegated to the almost forgotten past. It was vital, and it was happening right now. To us there was strange beauty there, deep passion, and the compositions often operated by rules and structures that were radically different from what we were used to. As a result, our limited ideas of what constituted music were exploded forever. These recordings opened up myriad ways that music could be made and organized. There were many musical universes out there, and we had been blinkered by confining ourselves to only one. ~ David Byrne

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 you make something you are always offering some choices and denying others. ~ 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

Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process. ~ 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

The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface. ~ 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 think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being. ~ Brian Eno

Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven't been made easier technically. ~ 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

Given the chance, i'll die like a baby, on some faraway beach, when the season's over. ~ Brian Eno

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

Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well. ~ Brian Eno

The seven white notes on the piano - each section of the piece (there are 12 sections) is five of those seven white notes. If you calculate it, there are 21 groups of five notes in any group of seven notes. And although there are 12 sections, this piece actually uses nine of those groups because some of the sections repeat earlier ones. So that's the formula. It's very simple as a way of generating something. It's my inner minimalist. ~ Brian Eno

I know that if I had a television in my flat I would convince myself that everything on it was really interesting. I would say, 'I'm a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here!' is so sociologically fascinating that I think I'd better watch. ~ 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

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

Reggie Watts is a most unusual talent: a huge vocal range, a natural musicality, and a sidesplitting wit. Is he a comedian? A singer? A performance artist? I've seen him a few times since then and I still can't decide. Whatever, he ain't like nobody else. ~ Brian Eno

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think inside the work - outside the work ~ Brian Eno

Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. ~ 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

Whenever there's a new music, there's a new way of listening. And whenever there's a new way of listening, there are new musics that follow from that. And people start listening differently - that can either mean in different places or at different volumes or in different social groups or through different technologies. ~ Brian Eno

The trouble begins with a design philosophy that equates 'more options' with 'greater freedom.' ~ 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

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

I had ideas about music and sound and listening and time and so on that I wanted to pursue as an individual, and by doing that book, Brian [Eno] opened the door, and he decided to do a record based loosely on the book. ~ David Toop

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

Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That's what surfers do - take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we've become incredibly adept technically. We've treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part. ~ 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

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

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 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

I've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip. ~ Brian Eno

Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research. ~ 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

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

I think one of the changes of our consciousness of how things come into being, of how things are made and how they work . . . is the change from an engineering paradigm, which is to say a design paradigm, to a biological paradigm, which is a cultural and evolutionary one. In lots and lots of areas now, people say, How do you create the conditions at the bottom to allow the growth of the things you want to happen? - Brian Eno ~ Katie Salen

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

By the mid-'60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas. ~ Brian Eno

I'm very opinionated. ~ Brian Eno

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

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

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

You just make different music on a computer. And you can make wonderful music on a computer, but don't pretend that the machinery is transparent. It makes as much difference to what you're doing as it does if you play an acoustic guitar as opposed to a kettledrum. You're not going to make the same music. ~ 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

The way 'Lux' was made is that there are 12 sections in here, though two of them are joined together. So there are really 11 sections, in a sense, and each one uses five notes out of a palette of seven notes, and my palette is all the white notes on the piano. That was the original palette. ~ Brian Eno

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. ~ Brian Eno

What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest - the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations. ~ Brian Eno

I got an amazing 10-CD set, it's the music that Alan Lomax recorded in Haiti in 1936. And what's incredible is how fantastic the drummers are and how off-the-grid they are. The liveliness is astonishing; they're just totally alive, these recordings. It's very interesting, to me, to be reminded of that, that there was a time when things were not that tight. ~ Brian Eno

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?' ~ Brian Eno

One day in Berlin ... Eno came running in and said, 'I have heard the sound of the future.' ... he puts on 'I Feel Love', by Donna Summer ... He said, 'This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years.' Which was more or less right. ~ David Bowie

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

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

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

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. ~ Brian Eno

I've got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things. ~ 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

People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually. ~ Brian Eno

When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting. ~ Brian Eno

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

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

I think that's very significant that we're so attached to the idea now of - it was something I advocated for years, that you can make music in studios, music doesn't have to be made as a real-time experience. But now you see the results of that in people who are completely crippled unless they know that they have the possibility of "cut and paste" and "undo." And "undo" and "undo" and "undo" and "undo" and "undo" again. ~ 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 do like Burial; he's so curiously clumsy, you can't help but be moved. It's so un-Hollywood, and the rhythms are so un-danceable. ~ 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

In the 19th century, a lot of people were against outlawing child labour, because to do so would be against the very foundations of a free market economy: 'These children want to work, these people want to employ them ... what is your problem? It's not as if anyone has kidnapped them ... ' ~ Brian Eno