Brian Eno Quotes

People take songs so literally.

Nobody talks about music as having intrinsic meaning, how it engages the mind.

I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing.

People used to assume I was a serious/sad person because of my music for some reason.

I sometimes never really realize what lyrics are saying.

I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours. Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.

The only thing that's a little tricky about it is sometimes people assume that if it's a new song, it's a reflection of what you're feeling or going through now.

If music leaves any impression at all, it does so without regard to stylistic issues.

For years, I've been interviewed, and they write what they thought I thought or what they thought I said. Sometimes it's accurate, and often it isn't.

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.

The video forum for me has been a source of great consternation because once you start projecting a look to a song, it robs the listener of their ability to adopt that song and make the lyric their own.

I love when people get songs wrong. I love when people take something from a song that's totally not what I intended!

I don't see music as working.

It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most. Singers, like Frank Sinatra and myself, we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written, we go back to the greatest songs.

A lot of people don't listen to the lyrics, really.

To the average mind popular music would mean compositions vulgarly conceived and commonplace in their treatment. That is absolutely false.

Whatever you do in life, there's content and form; only those two put together create special meaning of a great work of art or great interpretation of music or a great story that you tell.

I think recordings have been a terrific advance because now, when you have a piece of music, particularly something that appears to the listener very complicated, there's really a push to the world to try to figure out what it was that he was hearing.

I am passionate about music - and people think because I go to places where I can enjoy music I have to be partying. It isn't true.

We've all had that experience where we hear a song that we've liked for many years, and we finally hear what the writer tells us what it's about, and you're often disappointed.

If you are making music for other people, you will have to be aware of how people relate to it.

In art, scandal is a false narrative, a smoke screen that camouflages rather than reveals. When we don't know what we're seeing, we overreact.

There's so much you can do with laying words on a bed of music. You can completely change their meaning with the type of music or the way they're sung.

I think that most people who write about music just want to fill some paper. They're not really interested in getting to the heart of something. Otherwise, they wouldn't write what they write.

The hardest of all the arts to speak of is music, because music has no meaning to speak of.