486 Quotes by Brian Eno

You don't have to act as if you know what you're doing

Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.

Repetition doesn't really exist

I had an interesting day. I was in the studio with a group of musicians, who shall remain nameless, and I said to them "Our exercise today is not to use 'undo' at all. So, there's no second takes. Or, if you do a second take, you have to do the whole take. There's no sort of drop in, change that little bit". The session broke down in, I'd say, 40 minutes. It was impossible for people to work in that restriction any longer.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.

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

When I was at art college, the teachers who helped me were not the ones I agreed with, or the ones who encouraged me, but the ones who took very strong positions. Because if someone does that, you can find your own position in relation to it: what is it that I don't agree with? In the studio I want to articulate a position clearly enough so that other people can use it - or chuck it away if they don't want it.

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.

The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz.