Brian Eno famous quotes

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.
-- Brian Eno

#Art #Philosophical #Thinking

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

#Thinking #People #Music Is

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

#Kids #Listening

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

#Art #Smart #Ideas

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.
-- Brian Eno

#Dream #Song #Night

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

#Thinking #Feelings #World

American television really is pathetic.
-- Brian Eno

#Television #Pathetic

Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.
-- Brian Eno

#Telephones #Conversation #Values

I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another.
-- Brian Eno

#Art #Sex #Thinking

I believe in singing. I believe in singing together.
-- Brian Eno

#Believe #Singing #Together

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

#Hate #Caring #Cds

I love good, loud speakers.
-- Brian Eno

#Loud #Speakers

I believe in singing.
-- Brian Eno

#Believe #Singing #I Believe

Everything is an experiment until it has a deadline. That gives it a destination, context, and a reason.
-- Brian Eno

#Giving #Reason #Destination

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

#Strong #Feedback #Results

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

#Firsts #Intrusion #Occasional

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

Being completely free to choose what to do is actually quite difficult
-- Brian Eno

#Difficult

I despise computers in many ways. I think they’re hopelessly underevolved and overrated.
-- Brian Eno

#Thinking #Way #Computer

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

#Educational #Believe #School

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

#Ideas #Musician #Ashamed

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

#Government #Talking #Dubious

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

#Ideas #Evolve

I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.
-- Brian Eno

#Hate #Talking #I Hate

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.
-- Brian Eno

#Life #Past #Mind

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

#People #Computer #Worst

Everybody is entertained to death.
-- Brian Eno

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

#Creativity #World #Supplements

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

#Noise #Cages #Appreciated

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

#Art #Crash #Planes

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

#Thinking #Audience

Law is always better than war.
-- Brian Eno

#War #Law

Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on - including your own incompetence.
-- Brian Eno

#Skeletons #Incompetence #Constraints

Instead of shooting arrows at someone elses target, which Ive never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.
-- Brian Eno

#Eye #Arrows #Target

Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience.
-- Brian Eno

#Art #Triggers #Art Is

Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.
-- Brian Eno

#Situation

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

#Hate #Rocks #Bears

Every collaboration helps you grow.
-- Brian Eno

#Collaboration #Helping #Grows

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

#Knowing #Able #Kind

People in the arts often want to aim for the biggest, most obvious target, and hit it smack in the bull’s eye. Of course with everybody else aiming there as well that makes it very hard and expensive to hit. I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.
-- Brian Eno

#Art #Eye #Arrows

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

#Country #Research #England

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

#People #Important #Pieces

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

#Fashion #Play #World

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

#People #Velvet #Velvet Underground

You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.
-- Brian Eno

#Eye #Arrows #Target

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences... That solves a lot of problems ... Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen ... [W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you...
-- Brian Eno

#Art #Thinking #Quality

When you make something you are always offering some choices and denying others.
-- Brian Eno

#Offering #Choices

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

#Writing #What Matters #Atmosphere

If you had a sign above every studio door saying ‘This Studio is a Musical Instrument’ it would make such a different approach to recording.
-- Brian Eno

#Doors #Musical #Different

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

#Creation #Things Happen

The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement
-- Brian Eno

#Skills #Issues #Judgement

Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
-- Brian Eno

#Adjectives #Populist

I take sounds and change them into words.
-- Brian Eno

#Sound

Everything good proceeds from enthusiasm.
-- Brian Eno

#Enthusiasm

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

#People #Quality #Used

All music has political dimensions because it suggests a way of being.
-- Brian Eno

#Political #Way #Dimensions

Think inside the work - outside the work
-- Brian Eno

#Thinking

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

#Doubt #Increase #Simultaneous

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

#Believe #Self Confidence #Keys

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

#Interesting #Ambient

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

#Historical #Records #Kind

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

#Aquariums #Voice #Essentials

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

#Feelings #Development #Human Development

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

#Travel #Matter #Scene

A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.
-- Brian Eno

#Immortal

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

#Situation #Findings

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

#Inspirational #Inspiring #Play

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.
-- Brian Eno

#Thinking #Ideas #Personality

If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.
-- Brian Eno

#Strong #Growing Up #Ideas

Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.
-- Brian Eno

#Reality #Demand #Action

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.
-- Brian Eno

#Thinking #Furniture

I have a definite talent for convincing people to try something new. I am a good salesman. When I'm on form, I can sell anything.
-- Brian Eno

#People #Trying #Talent

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

#Letting Go #Listening #Want

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

#Ideas #Feelings #Evaluation

My interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to. I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist.
-- Brian Eno

#Together #Doe #Interest

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

#Moving #Player #Different

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

#Computer #Problem #Enough

Cooking is a way of listening to the radio.
-- Brian Eno

#Cooking #Listening #Radio

Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results
-- Brian Eno

#Roles #Littles #Results

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

#Emotional #People #Levels

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

#Art #Lying #Interesting

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

#Art #Philosophy #Calling

I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.
-- Brian Eno

#Country #Czech Republic #People

Whenever you listen to a piece of music, what you are actually doing is hearing the latest sentence in a very long story you’ve been listening to - all the pieces of music you’ve ever heard.
-- Brian Eno

#Long #Listening #Hearing

If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.
-- Brian Eno

#Torture

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

#Play #Band #Reason

I'd rather hold one note for an hour and modulate it so that it means something than play 3,000 notes in 15 seconds.
-- Brian Eno

#Mean #Play #Hours

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

#Art #World #Rehearsal

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.
-- Brian Eno

#Feelings #Important #Doing Nothing

I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity.
-- Brian Eno

#Technology #Computer #Driven

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

#Dance #Player #Talking

The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band
-- Brian Eno

#Albums #Velvet #Band

It's easy to forget that your best work is done when your attention is fully engaged.
-- Brian Eno

#Attention #Done #Forget

Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours.
-- Brian Eno

#People #Mind #Trying

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.
-- Brian Eno

#Musical #Sound #Territory

Everybody thinks that when new technologies come along that they're transparent and you can just do your job well on it. But technologies always import a whole new set of values with them.
-- Brian Eno

#Jobs #Technology #Thinking

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

#Editing #Earth #Film

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

#Stuff #Produce #Ready

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

#Sound #Corny #Mood

If you're in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.
-- Brian Eno

#Nature #Echoes #Tree