Quotes from Brian Eno

I do sometimes look back at things I've written in the past, and think, 'I just don't remember being the person who wrote that.'

In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.

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.

Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's inevitable.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

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 part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part.

I hate the rock music tradition. I can't bear it!

Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

By the mid-'60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

Although designers continue to dream of 'transparency' - technologies that just do their job without making their presence felt - both creators and audiences actually like technologies with 'personality.'

I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.

When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.

Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness.

I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.

I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It's still got the same strings on it.

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.

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

I think most artists would be happy to have bigger audiences rather than smaller ones. It doesn't mean that they are going to change their work in order necessarily to get it, but they're happy if they do get it.

Something I've realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we're smart about it.

I do love being in my studio. Especially at night.

I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.

Law is always better than war.

I've noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it's far enough in the future.

I take sounds and change them into words.