Quotes from Brian Eno

I trust my taste. I trust it completely and I always have done, and I've always thought it isn't that different from everybody else's.

I'm often accused of being ahead of my time, but it's simply not true. The truth is that everybody else is behind.

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.

I suppose I am reluctant about being any sort of 'star' and I didn't particularly want to be portrayed as one.

In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of 'their' works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.

I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren't historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.

The big message of gospel is that you don't have to keep fighting the universe; you can stop, and the universe is quite good to you. There is a loss of ego.

Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.

Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is.

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.

Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun, and I think I'm sort of building up to doing something else quite soon.

I have a definite talent for convincing people to try something new. I am a good salesman. When I'm on form, I can sell anything.

When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn't about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind.

Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.

Most people have no idea what something would sound like if it wasn't an MP3.

Instruments sound interesting, not because of their sound, but because of the relationship a player has with them. Instrumentalists build a rapport with their instruments, which is what you like and respond to.

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.

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.

I take sounds and change them into words.

I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.

I've had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I've often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.

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

What I believe is that people have many modes in which they can be. When we live in cities, the one we are in most of the time is the alert mode. The 'take control of things' mode, the 'be careful, watch out' mode, the 'speed' mode - the 'Red Bull' mode, actually. There's nothing wrong with it. It's all part of what we are.

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.