Brian Eno
The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.Collection: Ideas
I want to rethink surrender as an active verb.Collection: Verbs
Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do & do the last thing on the list.Collection: Statistics
I often say to people that producing is the best paid form of cowardice. When you produce things you almost always get credit, if it's a good record, but you hardly ever get the blame if it's not! You don't really take responsibility for your work.Collection: Responsibility
All the best lyrics are written in ten minutes.Collection: Minutes
The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface.Collection: Purpose
The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.Collection: Important
Of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do?Collection: You Choose
Look closely at the most embarrassing details, and amplify them.Collection: Details
I've never used a PC in my life; I don't like them.Collection: Used
I'm kind of an evangelical atheist.Collection: Atheist
I think, if you spend a day or - as many people do - a life working only with that aspect of your being, the cerebrum connected to a finger, I feel that the rest of you atrophies, essentially.Collection: Thinking
Except in a few cases like Music for Airports, which was a very clear case of noticing a niche [and] saying, "Okay, there's this situation in which people always play music, and nobody has written music for that situation so I'm going to." So, that was a very clear example of spotting a niche and working for it. I have done that occasionally.Collection: Airports
The seven white notes on the piano - each section of the piece (there are 12 sections) is five of those seven white notes. If you calculate it, there are 21 groups of five notes in any group of seven notes. And although there are 12 sections, this piece actually uses nine of those groups because some of the sections repeat earlier ones. So that's the formula. It's very simple as a way of generating something. It's my inner minimalist.Collection: Simple
I have these headphones, which pretty much exclude everything else so that you can really completely control the sound that you're hearing. I don't use them very much, I have to say. I very rarely listen on headphones.Collection: Sound
I love the sort of ambivalence of this, the ambiguity of something - being, for instance, in a quite busy Mexican restaurant with one of these very gentle tracks playing I remember as being particularly nice.Collection: Nice
I think the idea that people walk around to music is very interesting. They are actually creating the soundtrack to their lives as they walk around to it.Collection: Thinking
When you look back on a historical period of music, it seems so obvious to you what the characteristics of it are, but they're not obvious at the time. So, when I look back at my own work, I could easily write a very convincing sort of account of it that made it look like I had planned it all out from day one and that this led logically to that and then I did this and then that followed quite naturally from that. But that's not how it felt.Collection: Writing
It infuriates me that stuff from the Internet routinely doesn't include all the credits. Because as soon as I listen to something, if I like it, I want to know, "Who's the bass player?" "Who did that?" "Who's the engineer on this?Collection: Player
A big ego isn't necessarily a bad thing. A big ego means that you have some confidence in your abilities, really, and that you're prepared to take the risk of trying them out.Collection: Mean
I think very often producers are really trying to repeat things. When they hear something in the new songs that they recognize as being a bit like something that was a success on a previous record, they're inclined to encourage that.Collection: Song
I'm always interested in something when it isn't familiar to me.Collection: Familiar
The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a bandCollection: Albums
The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can.Collection: Stuff
Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.Collection: Telephones
You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.Collection: Eye
Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.Collection: Art
When you build a building, you finish a building. You don't finish a garden; you start it, and then it carries on with its life. So my analogy was really to say that we composers or some of us should think of ourselves as people who start processes rather than finish them. And there might be surprises.Collection: Garden
It's amazing how quickly people get used to bad quality.Collection: People
Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research.Collection: Country
The trouble with New Age music is that there's no evil in it.Collection: Evil
Don't be ashamed of your own ideas. Most musicians get applauded for sounding like someone else.Collection: Ideas
The most important thing in a piece of music is to seduce people to the point where they start searching.Collection: People
The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them.Collection: Computer
It's easy to forget that your best work is done when your attention is fully engaged.Collection: Attention
Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.Collection: Art
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature... The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.Collection: Black And White
The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgementCollection: Skills
My interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to. I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist.Collection: Together
One way of working is just bring a group of totally different musicians together and encourage them to stick to their guns, not to do the thing that normally happens in a working situation where everyone homogenizes and concedes certain points - so eventually they're all playing in roughly the same style. I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away. So there would be a kind of space in the middle where I could operate, and attempt to make these things coalesce in some way. In fact quite a lot of my stuff has arisen from that.Collection: Gun
W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you.Collection: Art
I'd rather hold one note for an hour and modulate it so that it means something than play 3,000 notes in 15 seconds.Collection: Mean
Put out as much as you can. It doesn't do anything sitting on a shelf.Collection: Sitting
I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another.Collection: Art
American television really is pathetic.Collection: Television
Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours.Collection: People
You can hear the profile of a sound, in retrospect, so much more clearly than you did at the time. And I think one of the things that's going to be nauseatingly characteristic about so much music of now is its glossy production values and its griddedness, the tightness of the way everything is locked together.Collection: Thinking
When I was working with Talking Heads what would happen typically is that they would go out and start playing a track, and I would always run the tape. I always record everything, even a run through where you're trying to get in tune. That's a principle because sometimes when the situation isn't clear interesting things happen, and they are worth listening to again.Collection: Running
What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest - the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.Collection: Writing