When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.
BRIAN ENOThink inside the work – outside the work
More Brian Eno Quotes
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The time I like listening to music most on headphones is, I have a game I play with my brother, he’s a musician as well.And he sends me MIDI files of keyboard pieces. So, these are pieces where I just get a MIDI file.
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 -
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.
BRIAN ENO -
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.
BRIAN ENO -
People in the arts often want to aim for the biggest, most obvious target, and hit it smack in the bull’s eye.
BRIAN ENO -
A responsible designer might try to overcome this limitation – probably the engineers at Marshall tried, too. But that sound became the sound of, among others, Jimi Hendrix. That sound is called electric guitar.
BRIAN ENO -
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.
BRIAN ENO -
Law is always better than war.
BRIAN ENO -
Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better.
BRIAN ENO -
The handbook always tells you what it does, and you can be quite sure that if it’s a complex device it can do at least fifteen other things that weren’t predicted in the handbook, or that they didn’t consider desirable. It’s normally those other things that interest me.
BRIAN ENO -
Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.
BRIAN ENO -
People who are very confident in themselves aren’t hurt by criticism. They make use of it.
BRIAN ENO -
I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It’s still got the same strings on it.
BRIAN ENO -
What happens with notation is that it reduces things to a language which isn’t necessarily appropriate to them. In the same way that words do, you get a much cruder version of what was actually intended.
BRIAN ENO -
We’re going through this super-uptight era, which I think comes entirely from literacy, actually. It’s the result of machines that were designed as word processors being used for making music.
BRIAN ENO







