Brian Eno

“In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.”

“If you've spent a long time developing a skill and techniques, and now some 14 year-old upstart can get exactly the same result, you might feel a bit miffed I suppose, but that has happened forever.”

“I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet.”

“Once you've grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you've inherited, you don't even notice it any longer.”

“The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.”

“Democracy is a daring concept - a hope that we'll be best governed if all of us participate in the act of government. It is meant to be a conversation, a place where the intelligence and local knowledge of the electorate sums together to arrive at actions that reflect the participation of the largest possible number of people.”

“I'm fascinated by musicians who don't completely understand their territory; that's when you do your best work.”

“I want to rethink 'surrender' as an active verb.”

“Zappa was very technical and impressed by things that were musically challenging - weird time signatures, strange keys, awkward chord sequences. Zappa was important to me as an example of everything I didn't want to do. I'm very grateful to him, actually.”

“I'm actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.”

“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.”

“One often makes music to supplement one's world.”

“Honor your mistake as a hidden intention.”

“If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn't bother to find new ones.”

“In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America.”

“I'm very opinionated.”

“When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.”

“Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's inevitable.”

“I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.”

“I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn't want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. 'Discreet Music' was like that, and 'Music for Airports.' What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out.”