Top 376 Quotes & Sayings by Brian Eno - Page 3

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.

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

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

I'm fascinated by musicians who don't completely understand their territory; that's when you do your best work.

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

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

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

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.

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

One often makes music to supplement one's world.

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.

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

I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.

The earliest paintings I loved were always the most non-referential paintings you can imagine, by painters such as Mondrian. I was thrilled by them because they didn't refer to anything else. They stood alone, and they were just charged magic objects that did not get their strength from being connected to anything else.

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

Painting, I think it's like jazz.

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.

Some people are very good at being 'stars' and it suits them. I'm grudging about it and I find it annoying.

'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.'

My shows are not narratives.

I love San Francisco and Brighton has something of San Francisco about it. It's by the sea, there's a big gay community, a feeling of people being there because they enjoy their life there.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.

It's actually very easy for democracy to disappear.

I know that if I had a television in my flat I would convince myself that everything on it was really interesting. I would say, 'I'm a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here!' is so sociologically fascinating that I think I'd better watch.

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

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

I'm very opinionated.

Well, there are some things that I just can't get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they're of my own creation, as well - and they're just as annoying. It's not only other people's ear worms that bug me, it's my own, as well.

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 used to think that, given enough goodwill, anybody would be able to 'get' any music, no matter how distant the culture from which it came. And then I heard Chinese opera.

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

Something I've realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we're smart about it.

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

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

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

With recording, everything changed. 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. It's an idea that many composers have felt reluctant about because it seemed to them to diminish the importance of music.

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.

Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.

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 do love being in my studio. Especially at night.

Instruments sound interesting, not because of their sound, but because of the relationship a player has with them. Instrumentalists build a rapport with their instruments, which is what you like and respond to.

The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can't afford to own it. So it isn't really part of their life in the way that music can be.

A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn't. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist.

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

Everybody is entertained to death.

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

I'm bloody awful at multi-tasking.

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

I'm a painter in sound.

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

I think I've committed the one really bad English crime, which is I've risen above my station. I was supposed to be a pop star, and suddenly I'm claiming that I'm an artist of some kind.

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.

You can't really imagine music without technology.

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

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.

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

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 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 becomes a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for cooperation with others.

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

Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.