486 Quotes by Brian Eno

You just make different music on a computer. And you can make wonderful music on a computer, but don't pretend that the machinery is transparent. It makes as much difference to what you're doing as it does if you play an acoustic guitar as opposed to a kettledrum. You're not going to make the same music.

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.

I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.

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.

You can't really imagine music without technology.

If you've spent a long time developing a skill and techniques, and now some 14 year-old upstart can get exactly the same result, you might feel a bit miffed I suppose, but that has happened forever.

W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you.

A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn't. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist.