Quotes By Brian Eno

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.

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

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

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.

I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.

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.

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.

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.

Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's inevitable.

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 had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.

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.