Quotes from Brian Eno

Even though I'm known as a pop musician, I have a seriousness about what I do.

My shows are not narratives.

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.

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.

A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn't. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist.

If I tried to make a commercial album, it would be a complete flop. I have no idea what the world at large likes.

You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits, it keeps becoming something else.

The English don't like concepts, really, not from a pop star. It's alright if they come from an 'intellectual,', but from a pop star you're getting ahead of yourself. Part of the class game is that you shouldn't rise above your station, and to start talking about concepts if you're in the pop world is getting a bit uppity, isn't it?

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don't fit in a very interesting way.

Once you've grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you've inherited, you don't even notice it any longer.

I often work by avoidance.

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

It's easy to forget that your best work is done when your attention is fully engaged.

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.

I think generally playing live is a crap idea. So much of stage work is the presentation of personality, and I've never been interested in that.

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

I used to think that, given enough goodwill, anybody would be able to 'get' any music, no matter how distant the culture from which it came. And then I heard Chinese opera.

I'm very opinionated.

Pop music can absorb so many peculiar talents, ranging from the completely nonmusical poseur who just uses music as a kind of springboard for a sense of style, to people who just love putting all that complicated stuff together, brick by brick, on their computers, to people like me who like playing conceptual games and being surprised.

The way 'Lux' was made is that there are 12 sections in here, though two of them are joined together. So there are really 11 sections, in a sense, and each one uses five notes out of a palette of seven notes, and my palette is all the white notes on the piano. That was the original palette.

When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.

Think inside the work - outside the work

W]hat makes a work of art 'good' for you is not something that is already 'inside' it, but something that happens inside you.

I'm fascinated by musicians who don't completely understand their territory; that's when you do your best work.