Quotes by Brian Eno

About Brian Eno:

Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer, and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

Brian Eno

Honor thy error as a hidden intention.

Brian Eno

You either believe that people respond to authority, or that they respond to kindness and inclusion. I'm obviously in the latter camp. I think that people respond better to reward than punishment.

Brian Eno

I'm not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

Brian Eno

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

Brian Eno

Well, there are some things that I just can't get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they're of my own creation, as well - and they're just as annoying. It's not only other people's ear worms that bug me, it's my own,...

Brian Eno

Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren't susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.

Brian Eno

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

Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.

Brian Eno

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it's done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

Brian Eno

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

I think I've committed the one really bad English crime, which is I've risen above my station. I was supposed to be a pop star, and suddenly I'm claiming that I'm an artist of some kind.

Brian Eno

I believe in singing to such an extent that, if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing becomes a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything ...

Brian Eno

I do like Burial; he's so curiously clumsy, you can't help but be moved. It's so un-Hollywood, and the rhythms are so un-danceable.

Brian Eno

Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That's what surfers do - take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we've become incredibly adept technically. We've treasured the controlling p...

Brian Eno

A big ego means that you have some confidence in your abilities, really, and that you're prepared to take the risk of trying them out.

Brian Eno

I want to make something that is breathtaking. Of course, you can't make something that is always breathtaking, or you would never be able to breathe. You would collapse.

Brian Eno

If you're in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

Brian Eno

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

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

The Marshall guitar amplifier doesn't just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one.

Brian Eno

Author Bio

  • NameBrian Eno
  • DescriptionEnglish musician, composer, record producer and visual artist
  • BornMay 15, 1948
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionComposer; Writer; Painter