Best 252 quotes of Brian Eno on MyQuotes

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

I occasionally meet people and they say, 'Oh, I was born to Discreet Music'... They always have very weird eyes, those people.

I often say to people that producing is the best paid form of cowardice. When you produce things you almost always get credit, if it's a good record, but you hardly ever get the blame if it's not! You don't really take responsibility for your work.

I often work by avoidance.

I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.

I remember when in the early days of rock'n'roll, when everything sounded totally different, all amazing and blah blah blah blah blah. Now you can play me one second of any record from that time, and I'll say "1959" or "1961." I can hear precisely. It's like it has a huge date stamp on it.

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

I still do mostly listen to CDs. I think that every format really is a different way of listening. If you take a different sort of psychological stance to it - like, I think the transition from vinyl to CD definitely marked a difference in the way people treated music. The vinyl commands a certain kind of reverence because it's a big object and quite fragile so you handle it rather carefully, and it's expensive so you pay attention to how it's looked after.

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, if you spend a day or - as many people do - a life working only with that aspect of your being, the cerebrum connected to a finger, I feel that the rest of you atrophies, essentially.

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

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.

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

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.

I think that there's something that I still like about the fact of a package, like the latest report from somebody. "Okay, this is what they're up to now; this is what they're doing; who's working with them?

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.

I think the other thing that's important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time. In fact I often say that the biggest difference between classical music and everything else is that classical musicians sometimes shut up because they're told to, because the score tells them to. Whereas any music that's sort of based on folk or jazz, everybody plays all the time.

I think very often producers are really trying to repeat things. When they hear something in the new songs that they recognize as being a bit like something that was a success on a previous record, they're inclined to encourage that.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

I want to make things that put me in the position of innocence, that recreate the feeling of innocence in you.

I wish there was a serious investigation into flying saucers that wasn't conducted by crackpots. Unfortunately nearly all of the people who are interested in them kind of manufacture the evidence to fit the theories rather than the other way around. So it's very hard to find any dispassionate treatment of them. Maybe there isn't any scientific basis in which case that's why you never see any scientific evidence.

I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.

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

Listening to something is an act of surrender.

Look closely at the most embarrassing details, and amplify them.

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

Most big concerts sound disgusting and awful and insultingly bad. It's like going to the cinema and been shown a scratchy film which is upsidedown and the bulb had gone on the projector. The quality of large-scale live music is so shocking.

Most game music is based on loops effectively.

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don't fit in a very interesting way.

Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you're listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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