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.
BRIAN ENOOnce you’ve grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you’ve inherited, you don’t even notice it any longer.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.
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 -
Of course, like anybody I repeat myself endlessly, but I don’t know that I’m doing it, usually.
BRIAN ENO -
One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.
BRIAN ENO -
I had an interesting day. I was in the studio with a group of musicians, who shall remain nameless, and I said to them “Our exercise today is not to use ‘undo’ at all. So, there’s no second takes. Or, if you do a second take, you have to do the whole take.
BRIAN ENO -
When I work there are two distinct phases: the phase of pushing the work along, getting something to happen, where all the input comes from me, and phase two, where things start to combine in a way that wasn’t expected or predicted by what I supplied.
BRIAN ENO -
Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.
BRIAN ENO -
The artists of the past who impressed me were the ones who really focused their work.
BRIAN ENO -
Painting, I think it’s like jazz.
BRIAN ENO -
For instance, I’m always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.
BRIAN ENO -
Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.
BRIAN ENO -
I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
BRIAN ENO -
One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.
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 -
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.
BRIAN ENO







