Brian Eno Quotations | Page 2

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

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

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

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

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.

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

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

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

The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.

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

The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

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 think there's a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.

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.

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.'

I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.

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.

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.

I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren't historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.

In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of 'their' works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.

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.

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

Zappa was very technical and impressed by things that were musically challenging - weird time signatures, strange keys, awkward chord sequences. Zappa was important to me as an example of everything I didn't want to do. I'm very grateful to him, actually.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

I take sounds and change them into words.

I think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being.

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.

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

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

I've had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I've often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.

I've noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it's far enough in the future.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

'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.'

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.

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.

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.

I have the '77 Million Paintings' running in my studio a lot of the time. Occasionally I'll look up from what I'm doing and I think, 'God, I've never seen anything like that before!' And that's a real thrill.

I think everyone's inherently snobbish. Things that are very popular are not taken seriously, because the snobbish side of one says, 'Well, if everyone likes it it can't be that good.' Whereas if only I and a couple of other people like it, then it must be really something special.

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.

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.

I'm very opinionated.

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

A studio is an absolute labyrinth of possibilities - this is why records take so long to make because there are millions of permutations of things you can do. The most useful thing you can do is to get rid of some of those options before you start

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.

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.

Culture is everything you don't have to do.

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

Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

At the party, Rob Partridge said to me, "You gave hope to other balding men." My new epitaph: "Co-wrote a couple of decent songs and went bald shamelessly.

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

Repetition doesn't really exist

When I was at art college, the teachers who helped me were not the ones I agreed with, or the ones who encouraged me, but the ones who took very strong positions. Because if someone does that, you can find your own position in relation to it: what is it that I don't agree with? In the studio I want to articulate a position clearly enough so that other people can use it - or chuck it away if they don't want it.

The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz.

My shows are not narratives.

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

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