Brian Eno Quotes

“American television really is pathetic.”

“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.”

“Be the first to not do what nobody has ever thought of not doing before.”

“Culture is everything you don't have to do.”

“Don't be ashamed of your own ideas. Most musicians get applauded for sounding like someone else.”

“Everything is an experiment until it has a deadline. That gives it a destination, context, and a reason.”

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

“I can't duplicate my own successes, because part of the creation of that effect is making something happen that you didn't expect.”

“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.”

“Ideas reflect the moment, and so you have to use them. If you store ideas, they wither.”

“If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.”

“If there is a new fascism, it won't come from skinheads and punks; it will come from people who eat granola and think they know how the world should be.”

“In art, you can crash your plane and walk away from it.”

“It's amazing how quickly people get used to bad quality.”

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

“Law is always better than war.”

“Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.”

“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.”

“One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.”

“People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually.”

“Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.”

“Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.”

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

“Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.”

“The computer brings out the worst in some people.”

“The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.”

“The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement.”

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

“The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them.”

“The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.”

“The trouble with New Age music is that there's no evil in it.”

“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.”

“When you build a building, you finish a building. You don't finish a garden; you start it, and then it carries on with its life. So my analogy was really to say that we composers or some of us should think of ourselves as people who start processes rather than finish them. And there might be surprises.”

“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.”

“The reason conservatives cohere and radicals fight: everyone agrees about fears, no one about visions.”

“Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours.”