Brian eno quotes

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

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

Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.

Everything good proceeds from enthusiasm.

I love good, loud speakers.

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

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

I believe in singing.

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.

Being completely free to choose what to do is actually quite difficult

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.

I always have wanted to know how the whole thing was done, what the process involved. And I don't particularly enjoy that my music is stripped of ancillary details, and it just sort of comes out of this big tap called the Internet like water. I like some of my water to be neatly presented in a bottle. With a label on it.

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.

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.

The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature... The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

I can see the use and value of religion, just as I can see the use of mud wrestling, yoga, astronomy and sadomasochism. but I reject the idea that you can't be a deep human being without it or any of them.

The reason conservatives cohere and radicals fight: everyone agrees about fears, no one about visions.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

One way of working is just bring a group of totally different musicians together and encourage them to stick to their guns, not to do the thing that normally happens in a working situation where everyone homogenizes and concedes certain points - so eventually they're all playing in roughly the same style. I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away. So there would be a kind of space in the middle where I could operate, and attempt to make these things coalesce in some way. In fact quite a lot of my stuff has arisen from that.

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

When I was working with Talking Heads what would happen typically is that they would go out and start playing a track, and I would always run the tape. I always record everything, even a run through where you're trying to get in tune. That's a principle because sometimes when the situation isn't clear interesting things happen, and they are worth listening to again.

Every collaboration helps you grow.

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

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

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

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.

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

Cultural objects have no notable identity outside of that which we confer upon them. Their value is entirely a product of the interaction that we have with them.

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

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.

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.

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

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.

The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.

Everybody is entertained to death.

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.

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.

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.

I had an interesting day. I was in the studio with a group of musicians, who shall remain nameless, and I said to them "Our exercise today is not to use 'undo' at all. So, there's no second takes. Or, if you do a second take, you have to do the whole take. There's no sort of drop in, change that little bit". The session broke down in, I'd say, 40 minutes. It was impossible for people to work in that restriction any longer.

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

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.

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

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

Honor thy error as a hidden intention.

If there is a new fascism, it won't come from skinheads and punks; it will come from people who eat granola and think they know how the world should be.

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.

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it's done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

Quite often, and in fact more often, I would say, I'm struggling all the way through to think, "What is it I like about this? What is the personality of this thing I'm hearing that I like so much?" And it's nearly always a sort of mixed emotion, which is why I like it. It's something that I have mixed feelings about in the sense that it's both, say, placid and dangerous, or bitter and sweet, or dark and bright.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 often work by avoidance.

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

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.

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

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

The trouble with New Age music is that there's no evil in it.

Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.

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.

People who are very confident in themselves aren't hurt by criticism. They make use of it.

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

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

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.

When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings - to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

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

Repetition doesn't really exist

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

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

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

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

The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.

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

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.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

I believe in singing. I believe in singing together.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

American television really is pathetic.

Culture is everything you don't have to do.

We're going through this super-uptight era, which I think comes entirely from literacy, actually. It's the result of machines that were designed as word processors being used for making music.

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

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

Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.

Law is always better than war.

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.

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.

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

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.

One often makes music to supplement one's world.

Frequently, I go straight into the studio and see what's around. I might hire a couple of instruments that I've never used - maybe a particular type of electronic organ or an echo unit. Then I just dabble with sounds until something starts to happen that suggests a texture. The texture suggests some kind of mood, and the mood suggests some kind of lyric. That's like working in reverse, often quite the other way around, from sound to song. Although often they stop before they get to the song stage.

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

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

What happens with notation is that it reduces things to a language which isn't necessarily appropriate to them. In the same way that words do, you get a much cruder version of what was actually intended.

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.

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

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.

It's actually very easy for democracy to disappear.

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.

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

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.

Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

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