Top 250 Brian Eno Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven’t been made easier technically.”

— Brian Eno

152. “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

153. “Every collaboration helps you grow.”

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Brian Eno

162. “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

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

— Brian Eno

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

173. “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

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

— Brian Eno

175. “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

176. “Everything good proceeds from enthusiasm.”

— Brian Eno

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

186. “Of course, like anybody I repeat myself endlessly, but I don’t know that I’m doing it, usually.”

— Brian Eno

187. “Ideas reflect the moment, and so you have to use them. If you store ideas, they wither.”

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

189. “Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.”

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

— Brian Eno

199. “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

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

— Brian Eno