Quotes from Brian Eno

Although cover notes for classical music albums tend to say that the trill of flutes suggests mountain streams and so on, I don't think anybody listens to music with the expectation that they're going to be presented with a sort of landscape painting.

My guitar only has five strings 'cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there.

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

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.

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.

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

In art, you CAN crash your plane and walk away from it

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

I want to rethink 'surrender' as an active verb.

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

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, 'Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!'

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.

If you want to make computers that really work, create a design team composed only of healthy, active women with lots else to do in their lives, and give them carte blanche.

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

I despise computers in many ways. I think they're hopelessly underevolved and overrated.

The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement

A big ego isn't necessarily a bad thing. 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.

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

Everybody is entertained to death.

When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings - to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience.

Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.

I felt extremely uncomfortable as the focal point, in the spotlight. I really like the behind the scenes role, because all my freedom is there.

I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.