Quotes By 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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I often work by avoidance.

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

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.

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.

It's not the destination that matters. It's the change of scene.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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