486 Quotes by Brian Eno

What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest - the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.

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.

I take sounds and change them into words.

I got an amazing 10-CD set, it's the music that Alan Lomax recorded in Haiti in 1936. And what's incredible is how fantastic the drummers are and how off-the-grid they are. The liveliness is astonishing; they're just totally alive, these recordings. It's very interesting, to me, to be reminded of that, that there was a time when things were not that tight.

A big ego means that you have some confidence in your abilities, really, and that you're prepared to take the risk of trying them out.

I think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being.

If you had a sign above every studio door saying ‘This Studio is a Musical Instrument’ it would make such a different approach to recording.

I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.

I cant duplicate my own successes, because part of the creation of that effect is making something happen that you didn't expect