Brian Eno

When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.

I don't like celebrity programmes - but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.

You can't really imagine music without technology.

Even though I'm known as a pop musician, I have a seriousness about what I do.

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.

I'm very opinionated.

I think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.

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.

Complexity and intelligence grow from simplicity not from greater complexity.

The Marshall guitar amplifier doesn't just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one.

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

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.

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.

Well, there are some things that I just can't get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they're of my own creation, as well - and they're just as annoying. It's not only other people's ear worms that bug me, it's my own, as well.

It's nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn't think of.

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.

Classical - perhaps I should say 'orchestral' - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities.

Instruments sound interesting, not because of their sound, but because of the relationship a player has with them. Instrumentalists build a rapport with their instruments, which is what you like and respond to.

I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.

Most people have no idea what something would sound like if it wasn't an MP3.

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.

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.

Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven't been made easier technically.

Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren't susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.

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.

Most game music is based on loops effectively.

The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.

I don't live in the past at all; I'm always wanting to do something new. I make a point of constantly trying to forget and get things out of my mind.

I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet.

I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me.

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.

I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.

I've noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it's far enough in the future.

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.

In my normal life I'm a very unadventurous person.

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

I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.

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

When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.

Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.

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'm bloody awful at multi-tasking.

I love San Francisco and Brighton has something of San Francisco about it. It's by the sea, there's a big gay community, a feeling of people being there because they enjoy their life there.

The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.

For instance, I'm always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

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.

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.

I think generally playing live is a crap idea. So much of stage work is the presentation of personality, and I've never been interested in that.

My shows are not narratives.

I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.

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

I often work by avoidance.

The earliest paintings I loved were always the most non-referential paintings you can imagine, by painters such as Mondrian. I was thrilled by them because they didn't refer to anything else. They stood alone, and they were just charged magic objects that did not get their strength from being connected to anything else.

I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.

Painting, I think it's like jazz.

I'd love it if American kids were listening to Muslim music.

I'm actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.

By the mid-'60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.

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

A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.

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.

Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That's what surfers do - take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we've become incredibly adept technically. We've treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part.

A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn't. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist.

I believe in singing to such an extent that, if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing becomes a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for cooperation with others.

I wouldn't call myself a synaesthete in the sense that Nabokov was. But I'll talk about a sound as being cold blue or dark brown. For descriptive purposes, yes, I often see colors when I'm listening to music and think, 'Oh, there's not enough sort of yellowy stuff in here, or not enough white.'

It must be quite mysterious to some people why I bother to carry on. Because, you know, I don't sell that many records.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.

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.

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.

When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks.'

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.

The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can't afford to own it. So it isn't really part of their life in the way that music can be.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when - and he won't necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.

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

When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings - to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

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

You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits, it keeps becoming something else.

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.

I dont live in the past at all Im always wanting to do something new. I make a point of constantly trying to forget and get things out of my mind.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness.

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.

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.

In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of 'their' works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.

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.

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.

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.

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

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

I'm an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call 'the last illusion.' The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what's going on but that the planets know what's going on.

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

Sometimes you recognize that there is a category of human experience that has not been identified but everyone knows about it. That is when I find a term to describe it.

The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface.

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.

I love good, loud speakers.