Brian Eno

Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

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

I do like Burial; he's so curiously clumsy, you can't help but be moved. It's so un-Hollywood, and the rhythms are so un-danceable.

It's insane that, since the Beatles and Dylan, it's assumed that all musicians should do everything themselves. It's that ridiculous, teenage idea that when Mick Jagger sings, he's telling you something about his own life. It's so arrogant to think that people would want to know about it anyway!

I have a definite talent for convincing people to try something new. I am a good salesman. When I'm on form, I can sell anything.

I take sounds and change them into words.

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.

I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.

I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.

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

I'm an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call 'the last illusion.' The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what's going on but that the planets know what's going on.

I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.

Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better.

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.

The Marshall guitar amplifier doesn't just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one.

Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!

You either believe that people respond to authority, or that they respond to kindness and inclusion. I'm obviously in the latter camp. I think that people respond better to reward than punishment.

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

I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.