Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's inevitable.
- Brian Eno Quote

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 Quote

Every collaboration helps you grow. With Bowie, it's different every time. I know how to create settings, unusual aural environments. That inspires him. He's very quick.
- Brian Eno Quote

For me it's always contingent on getting a sound-the sound always suggests what kind of melody it should be. So it's always sound first and then the line afterwards.
- Brian Eno Quote

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.
- Brian Eno Quote

I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It's still got the same strings on it.
- Brian Eno Quote

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.
- Brian Eno Quote

I felt extremely uncomfortable as the focal point, in the spotlight. I really like the behind the scenes role, because all my freedom is there.
- Brian Eno Quote

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.
- Brian Eno Quote

I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.
- Brian Eno Quote

I hate the rock music tradition. I can't bear it!
- Brian Eno Quote

I have a definite talent for convincing people to try something new. I am a good salesman. When I'm on form, I can sell anything.
- Brian Eno Quote

I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.
- Brian Eno Quote

I often work by avoidance.
- Brian Eno Quote

I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.
- Brian Eno Quote

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.
- Brian Eno Quote

I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.
- Brian Eno Quote

I've discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that's already there.
- Brian Eno Quote

If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn't bother to find new ones.
- Brian Eno Quote

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.
- Brian Eno Quote

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.
- Brian Eno Quote

In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.
- Brian Eno Quote

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don't fit in a very interesting way.
- Brian Eno Quote

Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you're listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.
- Brian Eno Quote

My guitar only has five strings 'cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there.
- Brian Eno Quote

Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun, and I think I'm sort of building up to doing something else quite soon.
- Brian Eno Quote

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.
- Brian Eno Quote

Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!
- Brian Eno Quote

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 Quote

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.
- Brian Eno Quote

The reason I don't tour is that I don't know how to front a band. What would I do? I can't really play anything well enough to deal with that situation.
- Brian Eno Quote

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.
- Brian Eno Quote

When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.
- Brian Eno Quote