About Brian Eno: Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer, and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.
The earliest paintings I loved were always the most non-referential paintings you can imagine, by painters such as Mondrian. I was thrilled by them because they didn't refer to anything else. They stood alone, and they were just charged magic objects...
In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas...
The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can't afford to own it. So it isn't really part of their life in the way that music can be.
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.
One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.
The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.
I think there's a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same ne...
I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make ...
I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.
One of the things you're doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.
People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually.
I'm fascinated by musicians who don't completely understand their territory; that's when you do your best 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 ac...
If we are ever going to achieve a rational approach to organizing our affairs, we have to dignify the process of admitting to being wrong. It doesn't help matters at all if the media, or your friends, accuse you of "flip-flopping" when you change you...
We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
Sometimes you recognize that there is a category of human experience that has not been identified but everyone knows about it. That is when I find a term to describe it.
I felt extremely uncomfortable as the focal point, in the spotlight. I really like the behind the scenes role, because all my freedom is there.
I'm actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.
It's not the destination that matters. It's the change of scene.
