I think I’ve committed the one really bad English crime, which is I’ve risen above my station. I was supposed to be a pop star, and suddenly I’m claiming that I’m an artist of some kind. – Brian Eno
I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice. – Brian Eno
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. – Brian Eno
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. – Brian Eno
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. – Brian Eno
When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it’s the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone’s talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false ‘intelligence’ and selected ‘leaks.’ – Brian Eno
The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It’s fine to be a pop star. ‘Oh, it’s great, lots of fun, aren’t they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!’ – Brian Eno
Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we’ve been having with painting. There’s no way of looking at art as though you hadn’t seen art before. – Brian Eno
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. – Brian Eno
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. – Brian Eno
When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output. – Brian Eno
I do like Burial; he’s so curiously clumsy, you can’t help but be moved. It’s so un-Hollywood, and the rhythms are so un-danceable. – Brian Eno
When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me. – Brian Eno
If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender. – Brian Eno
If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas. – Brian Eno
For instance, I’m always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before. – Brian Eno
I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming. – Brian Eno
I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity. – Brian Eno
I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me. – Brian Eno
I don’t like celebrity programmes – but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve. – Brian Eno
I’ve noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it’s far enough in the future. – Brian Eno
The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular. – Brian Eno
I don’t want to do free jazz! Because free jazz – which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering – isn’t actually free at all. It’s just constrained by what your muscles can do. – Brian Eno
The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don’t set out to say anything very important. – Brian Eno
I felt extremely uncomfortable as the focal point, in the spotlight. I really like the behind the scenes role, because all my freedom is there. – Brian Eno