Brian Eno Thinking Quotations

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

You either believe that people respond to authority, or that they respond to kindness and inclusion. I'm obviously in the latter camp. I think that people respond better to reward than punishment.

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.

I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.

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.

Everybody thinks that when new technologies come along that they're transparent and you can just do your job well on it. But technologies always import a whole new set of values with them.

I know that if I had a television in my flat I would convince myself that everything on it was really interesting. I would say, 'I'm a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here!' is so sociologically fascinating that I think I'd better watch.

I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.

I do sometimes look back at things I've written in the past, and think, 'I just don't remember being the person who wrote that.'

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.

I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.

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.

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, 'What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?'

I think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being.

It's nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn't think of.

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.

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

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.

I think, if you spend a day or as many people do a life working only with that aspect of your being, the cerebrum connected to a finger, I feel that the rest of you atrophies, essentially.

I despise computers in many ways. I think they’re hopelessly underevolved and overrated.

I think that's very significant that we're so attached to the idea now of - it was something I advocated for years, that you can make music in studios, music doesn't have to be made as a real-time experience. But now you see the results of that in people who are completely crippled unless they know that they have the possibility of "cut and paste" and "undo." And "undo" and "undo" and "undo" and "undo" and "undo" again.

I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another.

You can hear the profile of a sound, in retrospect, so much more clearly than you did at the time. And I think one of the things that's going to be nauseatingly characteristic about so much music of now is its glossy production values and its griddedness, the tightness of the way everything is locked together.

I think the idea that people walk around to music is very interesting. They are actually creating the soundtrack to their lives as they walk around to it.

I still do mostly listen to CDs. I think that every format really is a different way of listening. If you take a different sort of psychological stance to it - like, I think the transition from vinyl to CD definitely marked a difference in the way people treated music. The vinyl commands a certain kind of reverence because it's a big object and quite fragile so you handle it rather carefully, and it's expensive so you pay attention to how it's looked after.

Often, I think you find that you're enjoying certain things, you've got this new way of listening, and you find that you really enjoy the way that sounds on it and the way this other thing sounds on it and the way that other thing sounds on it. So, you're finding a new pleasure that you didn't know about before.

In terms of what has been happening recently, there have been, I think, some really interesting new instruments that have come out that sort of show me the direction of the future. Korg has introduced the - they've had a whole series now of these things called Kaoss Pads. They're wonderful because they do get your muscles working again. And what DJs do, of course, with their DJ turntables now, the CD turntables, which have pitch change and speed change and everything else. They're doing something that I think is interestingly physical.

I think very often producers are really trying to repeat things. When they hear something in the new songs that they recognize as being a bit like something that was a success on a previous record, they're inclined to encourage that.

Think inside the work - outside the work

We're going through this super-uptight era, which I think comes entirely from literacy, actually. It's the result of machines that were designed as word processors being used for making music.

I think the other thing that's important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time. In fact I often say that the biggest difference between classical music and everything else is that classical musicians sometimes shut up because they're told to, because the score tells them to. Whereas any music that's sort of based on folk or jazz, everybody plays all the time.

There's a kind of edge to what you're doing, the kind of leading edge of what you're doing. Inside that edge [are elements you] are familiar with, and are probably becoming slightly bored with, as well, over a period of time. "I've pulled that one out before. Oh, no, I can't I'm just fed up with that. Let's do something else."And you always think "Oh my God I've never done anything at all like that before." But, of course, in retrospect, and to an outsider, they'll say, "Oh, yeah that's typical Eno."

I think that there's something that I still like about the fact of a package, like the latest report from somebody. "Okay, this is what they're up to now; this is what they're doing; who's working with them?".

When I've finally got the title, I think, "Okay, yes, now I know where we are. Now I know what it is. Fine, that must be finished or nearly finished."

Sometimes something intrigues me about particular sounds, how they work together, and I think "Okay, I've found something here; I'm going to take it somewhere." And sometimes just to find a name for that sound, whatever it is, ends up becoming a title of the piece or becoming part of the title.

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.

Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.

Painting, I think it's like jazz.