Explore Quotes by Brian Eno

When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.

The Marshall guitar amplifier doesn't just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one.

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.

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it's done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.

Sometimes you recognize that there is a category of human experience that has not been identified but everyone knows about it. That is when I find a term to describe it.

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.

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.

One of the things you're doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

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.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when - and he won't necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

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 19th century, a lot of people were against outlawing child labour, because to do so would be against the very foundations of a free market economy: 'These children want to work, these people want to employ them... what is your problem? It's not as if anyone has kidnapped them...'

If you've spent a long time developing a skill and techniques, and now some 14 year-old upstart can get exactly the same result, you might feel a bit miffed I suppose, but that has happened forever.

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.

If you are part of a religion that very strongly insists that you believe then to decide not to do that is quite a big hurdle to jump over. You never forget the thought process you went through. It becomes part of your whole intellectual picture.

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 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 love San Francisco and Brighton has something of San Francisco about it. It's by the sea, there's a big gay community, a feeling of people being there because they enjoy their life there.