Brian Eno

“The Marshall guitar amplifier doesn't just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one.”

“In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of 'their' works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.”

“Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better.”

“I take sounds and change them into words.”

“If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.”

“I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.”

“A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn't. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist.”

“I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.”

“I've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.”

“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.”

“If you watch any good player, they're using different parts of their body and working with instruments that respond to those movements. They're moving in many dimensions at once.”

“When we go out to the country and just sit there, what we're really doing is just switching off various kinds of alertness that we don't have to use. When we do that, we are stopping being defensive. We are no longer shutting ourselves off from different types of experiences, we are welcoming them in.”

“I have a definite talent for convincing people to try something new. I am a good salesman. When I'm on form, I can sell anything.”

“I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.”

“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.”

“My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when - and he won't necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.”

“Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.”

“I think everyone's inherently snobbish. 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.”

“I'm kind of an evangelical atheist.”

“Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.”