Top 250 Brian Eno Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.”

— Brian Eno

102. “I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.”

— Brian Eno

103. “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.”

— Brian Eno

104. “People do dismiss ambient music, don’t they? They call it ‘easy listening,’ as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.”

— Brian Eno

105. “Don’t be ashamed of your own ideas. Most musicians get applauded for sounding like someone else.”

— Brian Eno

106. “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

107. “Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.”

— Brian Eno

108. “The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.”

— Brian Eno

109. “When people censor themselves they’re just as likely to get rid of the good bits as the bad bits.”

— Brian Eno

110. “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

111. “In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient – ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.”

— Brian Eno

112. “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

113. “Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.”

— Brian Eno

114. “You can’t really imagine music without technology.”

— Brian Eno

115. “I’m struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity.”

— Brian Eno

116. “I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.”

— Brian Eno

117. “I wanted to use the studio like a microscope for sound, which is what good engineers do.”

— Brian Eno

118. “Listening to something is an act of surrender.”

— Brian Eno

119. “I want to rethink ‘surrender’ as an active verb.”

— Brian Eno

120. “I describe things in terms of body movements. I dance a bit to describe what sort of movement it ought to make, and that’s a good way of talking to musicians. Particularly bass players.”

— Brian Eno

121. “I remember when in the early days of rock’n’roll, when everything sounded totally different, all amazing and blah blah blah blah blah. Now you can play me one second of any record from that time, and I’ll say “1959” or “1961.” I can hear precisely. It’s like it has a huge date stamp on it.”

— Brian Eno

122. “In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.”

— Brian Eno

123. “Some people are very good at being ‘stars’ and it suits them. I’m grudging about it and I find it annoying.”

— Brian Eno

124. “I don’t like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.”

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

126. “Repetition doesn’t really exist.”

— Brian Eno

127. “I’ve got nothing against records – I’ve spent my life making them – but they are a kind of historical blip.”

— Brian Eno

128. “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.”

— Brian Eno

129. “I can see the use and value of religion, just as I can see the use of mud wrestling, yoga, astronomy and sadomasochism. but I reject the idea that you can’t be a deep human being without it or any of them.”

— Brian Eno

130. “Being an artist is a job for life.”

— Brian Eno

131. “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.”

— Brian Eno

132. “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

133. “I love the sort of ambivalence of this, the ambiguity of something being, for instance, in a quite busy Mexican restaurant with one of these very gentle tracks playing I remember as being particularly nice.”

— Brian Eno

134. “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.”

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

136. “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

137. “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.”

— Brian Eno

138. “I do love being in my studio. Especially at night.”

— Brian Eno

139. “For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.”

— Brian Eno

140. “Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that sounds like a definition of pop to me.”

— Brian Eno

141. “I’m always interested in something when it isn’t familiar to me.”

— Brian Eno

142. “The thing that obsesses me more than anything is waste – the waste of human intelligence and creativity.”

— Brian Eno

143. “Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven’t been made easier technically.”

— Brian Eno

144. “Every collaboration helps you grow.”

— Brian Eno

145. “I’m always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven’t thought of doing yet.”

— Brian Eno

146. “American television really is pathetic.”

— Brian Eno

147. “Good teachers realise that the students are the antenna; they are sensing things that the teachers don’t yet sense.”

— Brian Eno

148. “It infuriates me that stuff from the Internet routinely doesn’t include all the credits. Because as soon as I listen to something, if I like it, I want to know, “Who’s the bass player?” “Who did that?” “Who’s the engineer on this?””

— Brian Eno

149. “I think we’re about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.”

— Brian Eno

150. “I’d love it if American kids were listening to Muslim music.”

— Brian Eno