Top 250 Brian Eno Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

3. “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.”

— Brian Eno

4. “Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”

— Brian Eno

5. “Genius is individual, scenius is communal.”

— Brian Eno

6. “Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.”

— Brian Eno

7. “If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.”

— Brian Eno

8. “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.”

— Brian Eno

9. “The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them.”

— Brian Eno

10. “Culture is everything you don’t have to do.”

— Brian Eno

11. “Cooking is a way of listening to the radio.”

— Brian Eno

12. “Complexity and intelligence grow from simplicity, not from greater complexity.”

— Brian Eno

13. “Everything is an experiment until it has a deadline. That gives it a destination, context, and a reason.”

— Brian Eno

14. “If you had a sign above every studio door saying ‘This Studio is a Musical Instrument’ it would make such a different approach to recording.”

— Brian Eno

15. “Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.”

— Brian Eno

16. “What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest – the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.”

— Brian Eno

17. “Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‘Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this’ – have become commonplace in films and music too.”

— Brian Eno

18. “The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can.”

— Brian Eno

19. “I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.”

— Brian Eno

20. “Think inside the work – outside the work.”

— Brian Eno

21. “It’s not the destination that matters. It’s the change of scene.”

— Brian Eno

22. “Well, I am a dilettante. It’s only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it’s called interdisciplinary research.”

— Brian Eno

23. “I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness, and a better sense of humor.”

— Brian Eno

24. “I love good, loud speakers.”

— Brian Eno

25. “I believe in singing.”

— Brian Eno

26. “I have a definite talent for convincing people to try something new. I am a good salesman. When I’m on form, I can sell anything.”

— Brian Eno

27. “I’ve never used a PC in my life; I don’t like them.”

— Brian Eno

28. “The computer brings out the worst in some people.”

— Brian Eno

29. “You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.”

— Brian Eno

30. “Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience.”

— Brian Eno

31. “Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on – including your own incompetence.”

— Brian Eno

32. “Everybody is entertained to death.”

— Brian Eno

33. “Possessions are a way of turning money into problems.”

— Brian Eno

34. “I’m very opinionated.”

— Brian Eno

35. “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?’”

— Brian Eno

36. “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

37. “Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.”

— Brian Eno

38. “People who are very confident in themselves aren’t hurt by criticism. They make use of it.”

— Brian Eno

39. “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

40. “All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.”

— Brian Eno

41. “I’m fascinated by musicians who don’t completely understand their territory; that’s when you do your best work.”

— Brian Eno

42. “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.”

— Brian Eno

43. “In art, you CAN crash your plane and walk away from it.”

— Brian Eno

44. “A big ego isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A big ego means that you have some confidence in your abilities, really, and that you’re prepared to take the risk of trying them out.”

— Brian Eno

45. “The trouble begins with a design philosophy that equates ‘more options’ with ‘greater freedom.’”

— Brian Eno

46. “Instead of shooting arrows at someone elses target, which Ive never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.”

— Brian Eno

47. “The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times.”

— Brian Eno

48. “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.’”

— Brian Eno

49. “The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.”

— Brian Eno

50. “Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.”

— Brian Eno