Top 250 Brian Eno Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “I often work by avoidance.”

— Brian Eno

203. “As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.”

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

205. “We’re going through this super-uptight era, which I think comes entirely from literacy, actually. It’s the result of machines that were designed as word processors being used for making music.”

— Brian Eno

206. “I don’t want to do free jazz! Because free jazz – which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering – isn’t actually free at all. It’s just constrained by what your muscles can do.”

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

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

— Brian Eno

209. “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

210. “The problem with improvisation is, of course, that everyone just slips into their comfort zone and does sort of the easy thing to do, the most obvious thing to do with your instrument.”

— Brian Eno

211. “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

212. “There is a sort of convergence starting to happen between the computer and musical instruments, but it’s still quite a long way off.”

— Brian Eno

213. “I despise computers in many ways. I think they’re hopelessly underevolved and overrated.”

— Brian Eno

214. “As struggles go, being an artist isn’t that much of one.”

— Brian Eno

215. “I think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being.”

— Brian Eno

216. “I suppose I am reluctant about being any sort of ‘star’ and I didn’t particularly want to be portrayed as one.”

— Brian Eno

217. “You don’t have to act as if you know what you’re doing.”

— Brian Eno

218. “I think the idea that people walk around to music is very interesting. They are actually creating the soundtrack to their lives as they walk around to it.”

— Brian Eno

219. “Being completely free to choose what to do is actually quite difficult.”

— Brian Eno

220. “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

221. “Of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do?”

— Brian Eno

222. “Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours.”

— Brian Eno

223. “Attention is what creates value. Artworks are made as well by how people interact with them – and therefore by what quality of interaction they can inspire.”

— Brian Eno

224. “I think very often producers are really trying to repeat things. When they hear something in the new songs that they recognize as being a bit like something that was a success on a previous record, they’re inclined to encourage that.”

— Brian Eno

225. “Songs that don’t depend on composition depend instead on performance – so the fire has to be there in the playing.”

— Brian Eno

226. “My shows are not narratives.”

— Brian Eno

227. “With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world.”

— Brian Eno

228. “I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.”

— Brian Eno

229. “The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.”

— Brian Eno

230. “I don’t like celebrity programmes – but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.”

— Brian Eno

231. “Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.”

— Brian Eno

232. “The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don’t set out to say anything very important.”

— Brian Eno

233. “I think most artists would be happy to have bigger audiences rather than smaller ones. It doesn’t mean that they are going to change their work in order necessarily to get it, but they’re happy if they do get it.”

— Brian Eno

234. “I’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.”

— Brian Eno

235. “It’s nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn’t think of.”

— Brian Eno

236. “If you are part of a religion that very strongly insists that you believe then to decide not to do that is quite a big hurdle to jump over. You never forget the thought process you went through. It becomes part of your whole intellectual picture.”

— Brian Eno

237. “If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn’t bother to find new ones.”

— Brian Eno

238. “All the best lyrics are written in ten minutes.”

— Brian Eno

239. “Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It’s inevitable.”

— Brian Eno

240. “The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.”

— Brian Eno

241. “Even though I’m known as a pop musician, I have a seriousness about what I do.”

— Brian Eno

242. “There are certain sounds that I’ve found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.”

— Brian Eno

243. “One often makes music to supplement one’s world.”

— Brian Eno

244. “The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz.”

— Brian Eno

245. “For instance, I’m always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.”

— Brian Eno

246. “I think it’s a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.”

— Brian Eno

247. “I’m bloody awful at multi-tasking.”

— Brian Eno

248. “In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America.”

— Brian Eno

249. “I hate the way CDs just drone on for bloody hours and you stop caring.”

— Brian Eno

250. “Regard your limitations as secret strengths. Or as constraints that you can make use of.”

— Brian Eno