Quotes from Brian Eno

The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.

One often makes music to supplement one's world.

People do dismiss ambient music, don't they? They call it 'easy listening,' as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.

Given the chance, i'll die like a baby, on some faraway beach, when the season's over.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

You can't really imagine music without technology.

Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.

The trouble begins with a design philosophy that equates 'more options' with 'greater freedom.'

I'm very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.

Some people are very good at being 'stars' and it suits them. I'm grudging about it and I find it annoying.

One of the things you're doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

Honor thy error as a hidden intention.

You have 62 people worth the amount the bottom three and a half billion people are worth. Sixty-two people! You could put them all in one bloody bus… then crash it!

People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually.

When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks.'

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.

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.

I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.

The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It's fine to be a pop star. 'Oh, it's great, lots of fun, aren't they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!'

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.

I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.

When I finish something, I want it out that day. Pop music is like the daily paper. Its got to be there then, not six months later.

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.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.