Brian Eno Quotes

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Brian Eno

Profession : Musician

Birth : May 15, 1948

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

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

Brian Eno

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.

Brian Eno

I love good, loud speakers.

Brian Eno

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.

Brian Eno

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

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.

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

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.

Brian Eno

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.

Brian Eno

I want to make something that is breathtaking. Of course, you can't make something that is always breathtaking, or you would never be able to breathe. You would collapse.

Brian Eno

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.

Brian Eno

Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is.

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

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

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, 'Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!'

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

I think everyone's inherently snobbish. Things that are very popular are not taken seriously, because the snobbish side of one says, 'Well, if everyone likes it it can't be that good.' Whereas if only I and a couple of other people like it, then it must be really something special.

Brian Eno

Although designers continue to dream of 'transparency' - technologies that just do their job without making their presence felt - both creators and audiences actually like technologies with 'personality.'

Brian Eno

I think there's a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.

Brian Eno