Brian Eno
When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.
I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.
People do dismiss ambient music, don't they? They call it 'easy listening,' as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.
People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually.
I believe in singing.
I do sometimes look back at things I've written in the past, and think, 'I just don't remember being the person who wrote that.'
For instance, I'm always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.
I think most artists would be happy to have bigger audiences rather than smaller ones. It doesn't mean that they are going to change their work in order necessarily to get it, but they're happy if they do get it.
Every band I've worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they've gone somewhere that nobody else has been.
It must be quite mysterious to some people why I bother to carry on. Because, you know, I don't sell that many records.
I make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs.
I've got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.
In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient - ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.
Everybody thinks that when new technologies come along that they're transparent and you can just do your job well on it. But technologies always import a whole new set of values with them.
The artists of the past who impressed me were the ones who really focused their work.
Even though I'm known as a pop musician, I have a seriousness about what I do.
I know that if I had a television in my flat I would convince myself that everything on it was really interesting. I would say, 'I'm a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here!' is so sociologically fascinating that I think I'd better watch.
I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.
I'd love it if American kids were listening to Muslim music.
Law is always better than war.
Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.
If you are part of a religion that very strongly insists that you believe then to decide not to do that is quite a big hurdle to jump over. You never forget the thought process you went through. It becomes part of your whole intellectual picture.
I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.
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.
There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.
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 think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, 'What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?'
Well, there are some things that I just can't get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they're of my own creation, as well - and they're just as annoying. It's not only other people's ear worms that bug me, it's my own, as well.
I love good, loud speakers.
I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
I've noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it's far enough in the future.
The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.
I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.
It's nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn't think of.
Something I've realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we're smart about it.
The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.
In my normal life I'm a very unadventurous person.
Of course, like anybody I repeat myself endlessly, but I don't know that I'm doing it, usually.
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'm bloody awful at multi-tasking.
I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, 'Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!'
I'm fascinated by musicians who don't completely understand their territory; that's when you do your best work.
I've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.
I love San Francisco and Brighton has something of San Francisco about it. It's by the sea, there's a big gay community, a feeling of people being there because they enjoy their life there.
I'm very opinionated.
All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.
The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.
The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture.
I've had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I've often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.