Brian Eno Quotes
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I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.
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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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The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz.
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I think the other thing that's important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time. In fact I often say that the biggest difference between classical music and everything else is that classical musicians sometimes shut up because they're told to, because the score tells them to. Whereas any music that's sort of based on folk or jazz, everybody plays all the time.
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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.
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I'm not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
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Look closely at the most embarrassing details, and amplify them.
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The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.
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I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.
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Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.
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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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I make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs.
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Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren't susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.
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I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another.
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I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.
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I occasionally meet people and they say, 'Oh, I was born to Discreet Music'... They always have very weird eyes, those people.
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A studio is an absolute labyrinth of possibilities - this is why records take so long to make because there are millions of permutations of things you can do. The most useful thing you can do is to get rid of some of those options before you start
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Things that are very popular are not taken seriously, because the snobbish side of one says, "Well, if everyone likes it it can't be that good." Whereas if only I and a couple of other people like it, then it must be really something special.
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When you build a building, you finish a building. You don't finish a garden; you start it, and then it carries on with its life. So my analogy was really to say that we composers or some of us should think of ourselves as people who start processes rather than finish them. And there might be surprises.
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I'm bloody awful at multi-tasking.
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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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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.
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Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results
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Being an artist is a job for life.
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If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.
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The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.
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If you're in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.
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I remember when in the early days of rock'n'roll, when everything sounded totally different, all amazing and blah blah blah blah blah. Now you can play me one second of any record from that time, and I'll say "1959" or "1961." I can hear precisely. It's like it has a huge date stamp on it.
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John Cage made you realise that there wasn't a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn't appreciated.
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The reason conservatives cohere and radicals fight: everyone agrees about fears, no one about visions.
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