Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.
BRIAN ENOI prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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I’m fascinated by musicians who don’t completely understand their territory; that’s when you do your best work.
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If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn’t bother to find new ones.
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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.
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I’m struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity.
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So, I try to make signs, graphically and visually, to say to people “Okay, this is this department of my work and this is this other department of my work.” And of course I’m very pleased if people like all of them, but I don’t want them to feel deceived at any point.
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You don’t have to act as if you know what you’re doing
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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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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.
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So, that means you can only play either very high or very low or both. And we’re going to stay there until I take my finger down.
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As struggles go, being an artist isn’t that much of one.
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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.
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I think very often producers are really trying to repeat things. When they hear something in the new songs that they recognize as being a bit like something that was a success on a previous record, they’re inclined to encourage that.
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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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I believe in singing.
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I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‘I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.’
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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.
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American television really is pathetic.
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It’s nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn’t think of.
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What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest – the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.
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The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them.
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I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
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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.
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I hate the way CDs just drone on for bloody hours and you stop caring.
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Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You’re glad someone’s done it but you don’t necessarily want to listen to it.
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I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away.
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As soon as you externalize an idea you see facets of it that weren’t clear when it was just floating around in your head.
BRIAN ENO