People in the arts often want to aim for the biggest, most obvious target, and hit it smack in the bull’s eye.
BRIAN ENOAll the best lyrics are written in ten minutes.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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Sometimes you recognize that there is a category of human experience that has not been identified but everyone knows about it. That is when I find a term to describe it.
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Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature… The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
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I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.
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Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!
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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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When you look back on a historical period of music, it seems so obvious to you what the characteristics of it are, but they’re not obvious at the time. So, when I look back at my own work.
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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.
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The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them.
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I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.
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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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Culture is everything you don’t have to do.
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Being completely free to choose what to do is actually quite difficult
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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.
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I wanted to use the studio like a microscope for sound, which is what good engineers do.
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In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient – ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.
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Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.
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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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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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Look closely at the most embarrassing details, and amplify them.
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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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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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I’ve always thought that art is a lie, an interesting lie. And I’ll sort of listen to the “lie” and try to imagine the world which makes that lie true…what that world must be like, and what would have to happen for us to get from this world to that one.
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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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People who are very confident in themselves aren’t hurt by criticism. They make use of it.
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One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.
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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.’
BRIAN ENO