110+ Brian Eno Quotes On Music, Brain And Land

Brian Eno is a British musician, composer, and record producer. He is best known for his pioneering work in ambient music and contributions to rock, pop, and electronica. He has produced a number of influential albums, including David Bowie's "Heroes" and U2's "The Joshua Tree". Following is our collection on famous quotes by Brian Eno on music, life, brain.

Top 10 Brian Eno Quotes

1. I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.
2. Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
3. Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.
4. The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band
5. I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.
6. 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.
7. Everything is an experiment until it has a deadline. That gives it a destination, context, and a reason.
8. Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research.
9. 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.
10. Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.

Brian Eno Short Quotes

• American television really is pathetic.
• I often work by avoidance.
• A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.
• Every collaboration helps you grow.
• It's not the destination that matters. It's the change of scene.
• I hate the way CDs just drone on for bloody hours and you stop caring.
• Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.
• Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.
• Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun.
• I'm very opinionated.

Brian Eno Quotes About Music

I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones. — Brian Eno

If you had a sign above every studio door saying ‘This Studio is a Musical Instrument’ it would make such a different approach to recording. — Brian Eno

Whenever you listen to a piece of music, what you are actually doing is hearing the latest sentence in a very long story you’ve been listening to - all the pieces of music you’ve ever heard. — Brian Eno

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience. — Brian Eno

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

What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest - the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations. — Brian Eno

The trouble with New Age music is that there's no evil in it. — Brian Eno

I believe in singing. I believe in singing together. — Brian Eno

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

One often makes music to supplement one's world. — Brian Eno

Brian Eno Quotes About Life

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. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

You feel as if you're not living a full life. Which, of course, is why - it's my theory about why so many people who are heavily into computers are also into extreme sports and S&M. It's because their bodies are crying out for some kind of action. — Brian Eno

Being an artist is a job for life. — Brian Eno

I've never used a PC in my life; I don't like them. — Brian Eno

Brian Eno Quotes About People

I have a definite talent for convincing people to try something new. I am a good salesman. When I'm on form, I can sell anything. — Brian Eno

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words. — Brian Eno

I'm very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement. — Brian Eno

What people call unemotional just doesnt have a single overriding emotion to it. The things that I like best are the ones that ambiguous on the emotional level. — Brian Eno

In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter. — Brian Eno

It's amazing how quickly people get used to bad quality. — Brian Eno

Not many people bought Velvet Underground LPs, but those who did, started a band. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that sounds like a definition of pop to me. — Brian Eno

Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours. — Brian Eno

Brian Eno Quotes About Point

I felt extremely uncomfortable as the focal point, in the spotlight. I really like the behind the scenes role, because all my freedom is there. — Brian Eno

I don't live in the past at all; I'm always wanting to do something new. I make a point of constantly trying to forget and get things out of my mind. — Brian Eno

I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

The most important thing in a piece of music is to seduce people to the point where they start searching. — Brian Eno

The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can. — Brian Eno

Also something that you don't have to listen to from beginning to end - you can enter at any point and leave at any point. — Brian Eno

Brian Eno Quotes About Idea

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work. — Brian Eno

The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me. — Brian Eno

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

The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

Don't be ashamed of your own ideas. Most musicians get applauded for sounding like someone else. — Brian Eno

Brian Eno Quotes About Interesting

I'm not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn't if you knew better. — Brian Eno

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time. — Brian Eno

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

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. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

You can't do anything interesting with cutting-edge technology except not make it cutting-edge. — Brian Eno

I'm always interested in something when it isn't familiar to me. — Brian Eno

Brian Eno Famous Quotes And Sayings

I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another. — Brian Eno

Good teachers realise that the students are the antenna; they are sensing things that the teachers don't yet sense. — Brian Eno

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

I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

If you watch any good player, they're using different parts of their body and working with instruments that respond to those movements. They're moving in many dimensions at once. — Brian Eno

Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process. — Brian Eno

The reason conservatives cohere and radicals fight: everyone agrees about fears, no one about visions. — Brian Eno

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich. — 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

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. — Brian Eno

Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

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

When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition. — 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

Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one! — Brian Eno

We're going through this super-uptight era, which I think comes entirely from literacy, actually. It's the result of machines that were designed as word processors being used for making music. — Brian Eno

If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn't bother to find new ones. — Brian Eno

Whenever there's a new music, there's a new way of listening. And whenever there's a new way of listening, there are new musics that follow from that. And people start listening differently - that can either mean in different places or at different volumes or in different social groups or through different technologies. — Brian Eno

Instead of shooting arrows at someone elses target, which Ive never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre. — Brian Eno

People in the arts often want to aim for the biggest, most obvious target, and hit it smack in the bull’s eye. Of course with everybody else aiming there as well that makes it very hard and expensive to hit. I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times. — Brian Eno

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

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. — Brian Eno

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great. — Brian Eno

If you think of the way a composer or say a pop arranger works - he has an idea and he writes it down, so there's one transmission loss. Then he gives the score to a group of musicians who interpret that, so there's another transmission loss. So he's involved with three information losses. Whereas what I nearly always do is work directly to the sound if it doesn't sound right. So there's a continuous loop going on. — Brian Eno

W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you. — Brian Eno

People always focus on people like me who use synthesizers, right, which are explicitly electronic and therefore obvious. "Ah, yes, that's electronic music." But they don't realize that so is the concept of actually taking a piece of extant music and literally re-collaging it, taking chunks out and changing the dynamics radically and creating new rhythmic structures with echo and all that. That's real electronic music, as far as I'm concerned. — Brian Eno

Culture is everything you don't have to do. — Brian Eno

The micro-compositions are the pieces themselves, but the macro-composition is the whole set of them and how it moves from track to track and how the titles relate to one another, for example. Always when I do records like this of a selection of instrumental pieces - the titles, to me, are very important. — Brian Eno

I'd rather hold one note for an hour and modulate it so that it means something than play 3,000 notes in 15 seconds. — Brian Eno

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

The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real. — Brian Eno

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? — Brian Eno

The thing that obsesses me more than anything is waste - the waste of human intelligence and creativity. — Brian Eno

I take sounds and change them into words. — Brian Eno

People who are very confident in themselves aren't hurt by criticism. They make use of it. — Brian Eno

Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun, and I think I'm sort of building up to doing something else quite soon. — Brian Eno

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

When you make something you are always offering some choices and denying others. — Brian Eno

It's easy to forget that your best work is done when your attention is fully engaged. — Brian Eno

When people censor themselves they're just as likely to get rid of the good bits as the bad bits. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

The seven white notes on the piano - each section of the piece (there are 12 sections) is five of those seven white notes. If you calculate it, there are 21 groups of five notes in any group of seven notes. And although there are 12 sections, this piece actually uses nine of those groups because some of the sections repeat earlier ones. So that's the formula. It's very simple as a way of generating something. It's my inner minimalist. — Brian Eno

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. — Brian Eno

The reason I don't tour is that I don't know how to front a band. What would I do? I can't really play anything well enough to deal with that situation. — Brian Eno

I got an amazing 10-CD set, it's the music that Alan Lomax recorded in Haiti in 1936. And what's incredible is how fantastic the drummers are and how off-the-grid they are. The liveliness is astonishing; they're just totally alive, these recordings. It's very interesting, to me, to be reminded of that, that there was a time when things were not that tight. — Brian Eno

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature... The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them. — Brian Eno

There is a sort of convergence starting to happen between the computer and musical instruments, but it's still quite a long way off. — Brian Eno

Life Lessons by Brian Eno

1. Brian Eno's work emphasizes the importance of experimentation and collaboration in music, showing how creative risks can lead to innovative and unique sounds.
2. His use of ambient music and soundscapes demonstrates how music can be used to evoke emotion and create atmosphere, rather than just being a collection of melodies.
3. His willingness to explore different genres and styles, as well as his use of technology, shows that music can be constantly evolving and adapting to new trends and technologies.