Brian Eno Quotes - Page 7

Often, I think you find that you're enjoying certain things, you've got this new way of listening, and you find that you really enjoy the way that sounds on it and the way this other thing sounds on it and the way that other thing sounds on it. So, you're finding a new pleasure that you didn't know about before.

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.

I still do mostly listen to CDs. I think that every format really is a different way of listening. If you take a different sort of psychological stance to it - like, I think the transition from vinyl to CD definitely marked a difference in the way people treated music. The vinyl commands a certain kind of reverence because it's a big object and quite fragile so you handle it rather carefully, and it's expensive so you pay attention to how it's looked after.

I think the other thing that's important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time. In fact I often say that the biggest difference between classical music and everything else is that classical musicians sometimes shut up because they're told to, because the score tells them to. Whereas any music that's sort of based on folk or jazz, everybody plays all the time.

I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.

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.

Cooking is a way of listening to the radio.

As struggles go, being an artist isn't that much of one.

You either believe that people respond to authority, or that they respond to kindness and inclusion. I'm obviously in the latter camp. I think that people respond better to reward than punishment.

Listening to something is an act of surrender.

A culture is the sum of all the things about which humanity can choose to differ.

Most big concerts sound disgusting and awful and insultingly bad. It's like going to the cinema and been shown a scratchy film which is upsidedown and the bulb had gone on the projector. The quality of large-scale live music is so shocking.

People do dismiss ambient music, don't they? They call it 'easy listening,' as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.

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

I want to make things that put me in the position of innocence, that recreate the feeling of innocence in you.

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.

Possessions are a way of turning money into problems.

In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America.

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.

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.

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

One night, I pissed into an empty wine bottle so I could continue watching Monty Python, and suddenly thought 'I've never tasted my own piss,' so I drank a little. It looked just like Orvieto Classico and tasted of nearly nothing

A studio is an absolute labyrinth of possibilities - this is why records take so long to make because there are millions of permutations of things you can do. The most useful thing you can do is to get rid of some of those options before you start

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

At the party, Rob Partridge said to me, "You gave hope to other balding men." My new epitaph: "Co-wrote a couple of decent songs and went bald shamelessly."