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 ENOOf course with everybody else aiming there as well that makes it very hard and expensive to hit. I 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 think that there’s something that I still like about the fact of a package, like the latest report from somebody. “Okay, this is what they’re up to now; this is what they’re doing; who’s working with them?
BRIAN ENO -
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.
BRIAN ENO -
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?”
BRIAN ENO -
If I tried to make a commercial album, it would be a complete flop. I have no idea what the world at large likes.
BRIAN ENO -
If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn’t bother to find new ones.
BRIAN ENO -
Every collaboration helps you grow.
BRIAN ENO -
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.
BRIAN ENO -
Well, there are some things that I just can’t get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while.
BRIAN ENO -
I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.
BRIAN ENO -
I don’t like celebrity programmes – but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.
BRIAN ENO -
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.
BRIAN ENO -
Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!
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 -
American television really is pathetic.
BRIAN ENO -
I want to rethink surrender as an active verb.
BRIAN ENO






