Brian Eno Quotes

Art is born out of an ill-designed world.

I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.

Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That's what art is: it's the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together.

Yes it was chaos, working through chaos, you never quite knew what you were going to do each day, but you knew that you wanted to make something.

Art happens-no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.

The world isn't logical, it's a song.

When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art.

And what is 'art'? - a firestorm rushing through Time, arising from no visible source and conforming to no principles of logic or causality.

Making art is an act of faith.

don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.

Art is like turning corners, one never knows what is around the corner until one has made the turn.

You can't always expect to work with a director who guarantees success.

Artwork is not like a commercial business; there is no such thing as a schedule for art. You can't hurry art.

Human nature is not amenable to prediction based on the trends or tendencies prevailing at the time. It is amenable to startling creativity of the kind practiced by great artists, directors, writers, musicians, actors, who know how to touch a chord in humans everywhere.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

Make good art.

You make something, and you really have fun with it, and you try to put emotion in it, and at the end of the day, you have no idea how the tide is going to fall. You don't know if everyone's going to like it, if everyone's going to hate it, if it's going to be like you're a media darling, or all of a sudden you're a sellout. You have no idea.

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.

Acting school was summer camp, and I needed concentration camp. I had so many different ideas swirling between culture and how to tie things together.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.

What's better, a poetic intuition or an intellectual work? I think they complement each other.

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.

Art is the triumph over chaos.

I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes or variations that lead to mastery... I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty. Other qualities may be more conducive to achievement, publicity, success; but they are all outworn - as outworn as ideologies, opinions, concepts and names for things.