Brian Eno Quotes

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Brian Eno

Profession : Musician

Birth : May 15, 1948

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

Brian Eno

You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits, it keeps becoming something else.

Brian Eno

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.

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

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.

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

When I finish something, I want it out that day. Pop music is like the daily paper. Its got to be there then, not six months later.

Brian Eno

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

Brian Eno

If you've spent a long time developing a skill and techniques, and now some 14 year-old upstart can get exactly the same result, you might feel a bit miffed I suppose, but that has happened forever.

Brian Eno

In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of 'their' works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.

Brian Eno

The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It's fine to be a pop star. 'Oh, it's great, lots of fun, aren't they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!'

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren't historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.

Brian Eno

I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.

Brian Eno

Sometimes you recognize that there is a category of human experience that has not been identified but everyone knows about it. That is when I find a term to describe it.

Brian Eno