Brian Eno

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

“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 l...”

“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 d...”

“If you watch any good player, they're using different parts of their body and working with instruments that respond to those movements. They're moving in many dimensions at once.”

“When we go out to the country and just sit there, what we're really doing is just switching off various kinds of alertness that we don't have to use. When we do that, we are stopping being d...”

“Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a pain...”

“I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn't want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. 'Discreet Mus...”

“The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Democracy is a daring concept - a hope that we'll be best governed if all of us participate in the act of government. It is meant to be a conversation, a place where the intelligence and loc...”

“I've discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that's already there.”

“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 rou...”

“Of course, like anybody I repeat myself endlessly, but I don't know that I'm doing it, usually.”

“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.”

“Everybody is entertained to death.”

“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.”

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

“If you've spent a long time developing a skill and techniques, and now some 14 year-old upstart can get exactly the same result, you might feel a bit miffed I suppose, but that has happened...”