Quotes By 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.

Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.

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.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

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.

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

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.

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.

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

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.

I take sounds and change them into words.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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