Brian Eno Quotes

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature... The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

Everything is an experiment until it has a deadline. That gives it a destination, context, and a reason.

Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on - including your own incompetence.

Everything good proceeds from enthusiasm.

Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience.

If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.

Be the first to not do what nobody has ever thought of not doing before.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn't if you knew better.

Honor thy error as a hidden intention.

You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.

The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times.

Ideas reflect the moment, and so you have to use them. If you store ideas, they wither.

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

John Cage made you realise that there wasn't a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn't appreciated.

The reason conservatives cohere and radicals fight: everyone agrees about fears, no one about visions.

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.

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

If there is a new fascism, it won't come from skinheads and punks; it will come from people who eat granola and think they know how the world should be.

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.

Don't be ashamed of your own ideas. Most musicians get applauded for sounding like someone else.

Attention is what creates value. Artworks are made as well by how people interact with them - and therefore by what quality of interaction they can inspire.

The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can.

Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.

Whenever you listen to a piece of music, what you are actually doing is hearing the latest sentence in a very long story you’ve been listening to - all the pieces of music you’ve ever heard.