But now you see the results of that in people who are completely crippled unless they know that they have the possibility of “cut and paste” and “undo.” And “undo” and “undo” and “undo” and “undo” and “undo” again.
BRIAN ENOThe 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.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.
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Quite often, and in fact more often, I would say, I’m struggling all the way through to think, “What is it I like about this? What is the personality of this thing I’m hearing that I like so much?”
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Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours.
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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.
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I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.
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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.
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At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.
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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.
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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.
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I love the sort of ambivalence of this, the ambiguity of something – being, for instance, in a quite busy Mexican restaurant with one of these very gentle tracks playing I remember as being particularly nice.
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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.
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The artists of the past who impressed me were the ones who really focused their work.
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Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.
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It’s amazing how quickly people get used to bad quality.
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Not many people bought Velvet Underground LPs, but those who did, started a band.
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The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
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The texture suggests some kind of mood, and the mood suggests some kind of lyric. That’s like working in reverse, often quite the other way around, from sound to song. Although often they stop before they get to the song stage.
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Once you’ve grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you’ve inherited, you don’t even notice it any longer.
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Painting, I think it’s like jazz.
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Law is always better than war.
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People in the arts often want to aim for the biggest, most obvious target, and hit it smack in the bull’s eye.
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When I’ve finally got the title, I think, “Okay, yes, now I know where we are. Now I know what it is. Fine, that must be finished or nearly finished.
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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.
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Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.
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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.
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I believe in singing.
BRIAN ENO