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. – Brian Eno
If you want to make computers that really work, create a design team composed only of healthy, active women with lots else to do in their lives, and give them carte blanche. – Brian Eno
I’ve got nothing against records – I’ve spent my life making them – but they are a kind of historical blip. – Brian Eno
People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually. – Brian Eno
A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn’t. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist. – Brian Eno
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. – Brian Eno
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. – Brian Eno
It’s insane that, since the Beatles and Dylan, it’s assumed that all musicians should do everything themselves. It’s that ridiculous, teenage idea that when Mick Jagger sings, he’s telling you something about his own life. It’s so arrogant to think that people would want to know about it anyway! – Brian Eno
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. – Brian Eno
In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that. – Brian Eno
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. – Brian Eno
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. – Brian Eno
I’ve had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I’ve often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head. – Brian Eno
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. – Brian Eno
Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about. – Brian Eno
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. – Brian Eno
I’m an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call ‘the last illusion.’ The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what’s going on but that the planets know what’s going on. – Brian Eno
When we go out to the country and just sit there, what we’re really doing is just switching off various kinds of alertness that we don’t have to use. When we do that, we are stopping being defensive. We are no longer shutting ourselves off from different types of experiences, we are welcoming them in. – Brian Eno
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. – Brian Eno
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. – Brian Eno