B

Brian Eno

57 quotes

Brian Eno (born 1948) is an English musician, composer, visual artist, and record producer who is widely regarded as a pioneer of ambient music. From his early work with Roxy Music to producing albums for U2, David Bowie, and Talking Heads, Eno has consistently pushed creative boundaries across art and technology.

“The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture.”

— Brian Eno

Music

All Quotes by Brian Eno

“Everybody is entertained to death.”

— Brian Eno

Death

“I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.”

— Brian Eno

Music

“Something I've realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we're smart about it.”

— Brian Eno

Future

“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

Music

“In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient - ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.”

— Brian Eno

Music

“The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.”

— Brian Eno

Art

“I take sounds and change them into words.”

— Brian Eno

Change

“The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.”

— Brian Eno

History

“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

Music

“One of the things you're doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.”

— Brian Eno

Art

“I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.”

— Brian Eno

Music

“I think most artists would be happy to have bigger audiences rather than smaller ones. It doesn't mean that they are going to change their work in order necessarily to get it, but they're happy if they do get it.”

— Brian Eno

Change

“If you are part of a religion that very strongly insists that you believe then to decide not to do that is quite a big hurdle to jump over. You never forget the thought process you went through. It becomes part of your whole intellectual picture.”

— Brian Eno

Religion

“I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.”

— Brian Eno

Music

“The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.”

— Brian Eno

Computers

“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.”

— Brian Eno

Music

“Most game music is based on loops effectively.”

— Brian Eno

Music

“Law is always better than war.”

— Brian Eno

War

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

— Brian Eno

Music

“The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture.”

— Brian Eno

Music