Quotes By 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 often work by avoidance.

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.

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.

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

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.