Quotes from Brian Eno

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.

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.

Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven't been made easier technically.

I'm actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.

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

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.

Everybody is entertained to death.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes you move to places you wouldn't if you knew better.

I make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs.

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.

Most game music is based on loops effectively.

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.

The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture.

Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.

I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet.

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.'

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

I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.

You can't really imagine music without technology.

I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.

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

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.