486 Quotes by 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.

Think inside the work – outside the work.

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.

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 suppose I am reluctant about being any sort of ‘star’ and I didn’t particularly want to be portrayed as one.

Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music – not like a record that you’d put on, which would play for a while and finish.

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.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

I know that if I had a television in my flat I would convince myself that everything on it was really interesting. I would say, ‘I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here!’ is so sociologically fascinating that I think I’d better watch.