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 ENOMost 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.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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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 -
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 -
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 -
I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
BRIAN ENO -
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.
BRIAN ENO -
Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.
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 -
I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.
BRIAN ENO -
Of 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.
BRIAN ENO -
I despise computers in many ways. I think they’re hopelessly underevolved and overrated.
BRIAN ENO -
For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.
BRIAN ENO -
The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.
BRIAN ENO -
The thing that obsesses me more than anything is waste – the waste of human intelligence and creativity.
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 -
It’s nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn’t think of.
BRIAN ENO