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Quotes by 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. The transfer is not paying off. Sure, muscles are unreliable, but they represent several million years of accumulated finesse.
– Brian Eno
You can't really imagine music without technology.
– Brian Eno
When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings - to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.
– Brian Eno
When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks.'
– 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
There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.
– 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
The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.
– Brian Eno
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.
– Brian Eno
The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.
– Brian Eno
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
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
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.
– Brian Eno
Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.
– Brian Eno
People do dismiss ambient music, don't they? They call it 'easy listening,' as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.
– Brian Eno
One often makes music to supplement one's world.
– 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
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
Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.
– Brian Eno
Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.
– 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
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
Most game music is based on loops effectively.
– Brian Eno
Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.
– Brian Eno
Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven't been made easier technically.
– Brian Eno
Law is always better than war.
– Brian Eno
It's not the destination that matters. It's the change of scene.
– Brian Eno
It's nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn't think of.
– Brian Eno
In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient - ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.
– Brian Eno
If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.
– Brian Eno
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.
– Brian Eno
I've noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it's far enough in the future.
– Brian Eno
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.
– 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
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
I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet.
– Brian Eno
I'm actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.
– Brian Eno
I'd love it if American kids were listening to Muslim music.
– Brian Eno
I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.
– Brian Eno
I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.
– 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
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.
– Brian Eno
I take sounds and change them into words.
– Brian Eno
I make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs.
– 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
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.
– 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
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
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 don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
– Brian Eno
For instance, I'm always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.
– Brian Eno
Everybody is entertained to death.
– Brian Eno
Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.
– Brian Eno
Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.
– 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
Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's inevitable.
– Brian Eno