Quotes from Brian Eno

I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.

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.

Honor your mistake as a hidden intention.

The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band

Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research.

More and more I find I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now.

You talk to me as if from a distance And I reply with impressions chosen from another time.

Cooking is a way of listening to the radio.

My interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to. I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist.

Stop thinking about art works as objects and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. What makes a work of art good for you is not something that s already inside it but something that happens inside you.

Honour thy error as a hidden intention.

If we are ever going to achieve a rational approach to organizing our affairs, we have to dignify the process of admitting to being wrong. It doesn't help matters at all if the media, or your friends, accuse you of "flip-flopping" when you change your mind. Changing our minds is our hope for the future.

The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface.

I'm kind of an evangelical atheist.

I want to make things that put me in the position of innocence, that recreate the feeling of innocence in you.

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

I believe in singing. I believe in singing together.

American television really is pathetic.

Regard your limitations as secret strengths. Or as constraints that you can make use of.

Tommy Cooper finds a painting and a violin in the attic; takes them to an expert who says, 'You've got a Stradivarius and a Rembrandt. Unfortunately Stradivarius was a terrible painter and Rembrandt made awful violins.

Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting

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!

Questions for U2: 'What record would you like to make – i.e. how would you like this to be read? How would you like to get there? Does it bother you if the result is 'undemocratic'? How much cheating is allowed? How much me?' Lincoln's axe: 'This is Lincoln's original axe. The head has been replaced three times and the handle twice.

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.