Brian Eno quotes - page 2

Brian Eno is an English musician, composer, and record producer, renowned as a pioneer of ambient music. His experimental approach has influenced countless artists and changed the direction of contemporary music. He has collaborated with acts such as Roxy Music, David Bowie, and U2. Here are 158 of his quotes:

Emotion creates reality, reality demands action. (Brian Eno)

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

Brian Eno

I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.

Brian Eno

I think generally playing live is a crap idea. So much of stage work is the presentation of personality, and I've never been interested in that.

Brian Eno

I often work by avoidance.

Brian Eno

I take sounds and change them into words.

Brian Eno

If you watch any good player, they're using different parts of their body and working with instruments that respond to those movements. They're moving in many dimensions at once.

Brian Eno

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

Brian Eno

A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.

Brian Eno

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.

Brian Eno

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don't fit in a very interesting way. (Brian Eno)

Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.

Brian Eno

If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn't bother to find new ones.

Brian Eno

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.

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

Brian Eno

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

Brian Eno

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.

Brian Eno

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.

Brian Eno

I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.

Brian Eno

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. (Brian Eno)

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.

Brian Eno

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.

Brian Eno

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

Brian Eno

I've discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that's already there.

Brian Eno

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Brian Eno

Brian Eno - Image

Photo: aomarks, CC BY-SA 3.0

Occupation: British Musician
Born: May 15, 1948
Quotes count: 158
Wikipedia: Brian Eno

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