Top 250 Brian Eno Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun.”

— Brian Eno

152. “I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.”

— Brian Eno

153. “I take sounds and change them into words.”

— Brian Eno

154. “I want to make things that put me in the position of innocence, that recreate the feeling of innocence in you.”

— Brian Eno

155. “I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.”

— Brian Eno

156. “I often say to people that producing is the best paid form of cowardice. When you produce things you almost always get credit, if it’s a good record, but you hardly ever get the blame if it’s not! You don’t really take responsibility for your work.”

— Brian Eno

157. “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.”

— Brian Eno

158. “Put out as much as you can. It doesn’t do anything sitting on a shelf.”

— Brian Eno

159. “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

160. “Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better.”

— Brian Eno

161. “I cant duplicate my own successes, because part of the creation of that effect is making something happen that you didn’t expect.”

— Brian Eno

162. “As soon as you externalize an idea you see facets of it that weren’t clear when it was just floating around in your head.”

— Brian Eno

163. “Sometimes something intrigues me about particular sounds, how they work together, and I think “Okay, I’ve found something here; I’m going to take it somewhere.” And sometimes just to find a name for that sound, whatever it is, ends up becoming a title of the piece or becoming part of the title.”

— Brian Eno

164. “It’s easy to forget that your best work is done when your attention is fully engaged.”

— Brian Eno

165. “Something I’ve realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we’re smart about it.”

— Brian Eno

166. “When I’ve finally got the title, I think, “Okay, yes, now I know where we are. Now I know what it is. Fine, that must be finished or nearly finished.””

— Brian Eno

167. “Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.”

— Brian Eno

168. “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

169. “Also something that you don’t have to listen to from beginning to end – you can enter at any point and leave at any point.”

— Brian Eno

170. “Once you’ve grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you’ve inherited, you don’t even notice it any longer.”

— Brian Eno

171. “For me it’s always contingent on getting a sound-the sound always suggests what kind of melody it should be. So it’s always sound first and then the line afterwards.”

— Brian Eno

172. “One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.”

— Brian Eno

173. “I’ve noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it’s far enough in the future.”

— Brian Eno

174. “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

175. “I think, if you spend a day or as many people do a life working only with that aspect of your being, the cerebrum connected to a finger, I feel that the rest of you atrophies, essentially.”

— Brian Eno

176. “Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!”

— Brian Eno

177. “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

178. “Everything good proceeds from enthusiasm.”

— Brian Eno

179. “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

180. “I make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs.”

— Brian Eno

181. “I hate the rock music tradition. I can’t bear it!”

— Brian Eno

182. “Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.”

— Brian Eno

183. “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.”

— Brian Eno

184. “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.”

— Brian Eno

185. “Most game music is based on loops effectively.”

— Brian Eno

186. “Painting, I think it’s like jazz.”

— Brian Eno

187. “A culture is the sum of all the things about which humanity can choose to differ.”

— Brian Eno

188. “You can’t do anything interesting with cutting-edge technology except not make it cutting-edge.”

— Brian Eno

189. “I’ve discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that’s already there.”

— Brian Eno

190. “I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, ‘Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!’”

— Brian Eno

191. “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.”

— Brian Eno

192. “Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.”

— Brian Eno

193. “When you make something you are always offering some choices and denying others.”

— Brian Eno

194. “When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.”

— Brian Eno

195. “What people call unemotional just doesnt have a single overriding emotion to it. The things that I like best are the ones that ambiguous on the emotional level.”

— Brian Eno

196. “The most important thing in a piece of music is to seduce people to the point where they start searching.”

— Brian Eno

197. “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

198. “If I tried to make a commercial album, it would be a complete flop. I have no idea what the world at large likes.”

— Brian Eno

199. “The artists of the past who impressed me were the ones who really focused their work.”

— Brian Eno

200. “I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.”

— Brian Eno