Best 252 quotes of Brian Eno on MyQuotes

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.

Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.

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

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.

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

All the best lyrics are written in ten minutes.

A lot of the so-called systems composers have this thing that the system is always right. You don't fiddle with it at all. Well, I don't think that. I think the system is as right as you judge it to be. If for some reason you don't like a bit of it you must trust your intuition on that. I don't take a doctrinaire approach to systems.

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

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.

Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

American television really is pathetic.

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

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

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

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.

As struggles go, being an artist isn't that much of one.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Being an artist is a job for life.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Every collaboration helps you grow.

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.

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.

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

Except in a few cases like Music for Airports, which was a very clear case of noticing a niche [and] saying, "Okay, there's this situation in which people always play music, and nobody has written music for that situation so I'm going to." So, that was a very clear example of spotting a niche and working for it. I have done that occasionally.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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 believe in singing.

I believe in singing. I believe in singing together.

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.

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

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.

I cant duplicate my own successes, because part of the creation of that effect is making something happen that you didn't expect

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

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.

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