Top 250 Brian Eno Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 4 of 6

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

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

153. “American television really is pathetic.”

— Brian Eno

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Brian Eno

157. “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

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

— Brian Eno

159. “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

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

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

162. “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

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

— Brian Eno

164. “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

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

— Brian Eno

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

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

— Brian Eno

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

186. “Most big concerts sound disgusting and awful and insultingly bad. It’s like going to the cinema and been shown a scratchy film which is upsidedown and the bulb had gone on the projector. The quality of large-scale live music is so shocking.”

— Brian Eno

187. “Everything good proceeds from enthusiasm.”

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

192. “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

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

— Brian Eno

194. “The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.”

— Brian Eno

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

198. “A studio is an absolute labyrinth of possibilities – this is why records take so long to make because there are millions of permutations of things you can do. The most useful thing you can do is to get rid of some of those options before you start.”

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

200. “I often work by avoidance.”

— Brian Eno