I think generally playing live is a crap idea. So much of stage work is the presentation of personality, and I've never been interested in that.
Brian Eno

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.
Brian Eno

I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.
Brian Eno

I'm not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
Brian Eno

I'm very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.
Brian Eno

I've discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that's already there.
Brian Eno

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

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

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.
Brian Eno

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.
Brian Eno

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

It's not the destination that matters. It's the change of scene.
Brian Eno

Most 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.
Brian Eno

Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.
Brian Eno

Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you're listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.
Brian Eno

My guitar only has five strings 'cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there.
Brian Eno

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.
Brian Eno

Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun, and I think I'm sort of building up to doing something else quite soon.
Brian Eno

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.
Brian Eno

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.
Brian Eno