I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.
BRIAN ENOAvant-garde music is sort of research music. You’re glad someone’s done it but you don’t necessarily want to listen to it.
More Brian Eno Quotes
-
-
If I tried to make a commercial album, it would be a complete flop. I have no idea what the world at large likes.
BRIAN ENO -
There are hundreds of manufacturers always producing dvices that in general do the same things. Since they have slight structural differences if you take one and fool around with it and give it a good kick it will actually do something that it wasn’t designed to do.
BRIAN ENO -
Being completely free to choose what to do is actually quite difficult
BRIAN ENO -
I despise computers in many ways. I think they’re hopelessly underevolved and overrated.
BRIAN ENO -
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 -
I hate the thought that someone had picked up one of my song records and was really excited about it, and walks [out of] a record shop with On Land and is disappointed because it isn’t what they wanted.
BRIAN ENO -
I hate the way CDs just drone on for bloody hours and you stop caring.
BRIAN ENO -
If you think of the way a composer or say a pop arranger works – he has an idea and he writes it down, so there’s one transmission loss. Then he gives the score to a group of musicians who interpret that, so there’s another transmission loss.
BRIAN ENO -
Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.
BRIAN ENO -
American television really is pathetic.
BRIAN ENO -
Something I’ve realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we’re smart about it.
BRIAN ENO -
With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world.
BRIAN ENO -
Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.
BRIAN ENO -
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.
BRIAN ENO -
Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.
BRIAN ENO