Brian Eno Quotes

I start a picture and I finish it.

More often than not, changes had to be made in order for a song to make sense, and by the end of it, it would just be something different. Lyrically, I am usually fairly confused until something is finished, and then it makes perfect sense to me.

You hope and pray that you'll get involved with a director that you understand and who has the same sensibility as you do and knows how to push you and bring out the best in you.

It's never a done deal until it's a done deal.

In response to the question, 'How do you know when you're finished?' Pollock replied, 'How do you know when you're finished making love?

When you can answer questions about what you think and when you can explain why you think what you think, that's power, it's comforting power.

The strength of the poetry as we enter into whatever it is we are entering into, will be determined by the clarity of the thinking we put into it.

I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.

Like when you have the right title for something you're writing and you get lost - you can always go back to the title and go, "Yeah, that's what this is about."

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

In literary art, as in the art of the architect, the painter, the musician, signs that the artist is thinking of his own achievement more than of his subject always offend me.

I've dedicated a lot of my life as a writer to understanding how to hear the divine voice, or the music of the spheres, or whatever it is that we do when we're making art, making something out of nothing. Figuring out how to do that is much more important than knowing how to execute a good line. I don't think about that anymore, I just write.

Sometimes I think I was making music through the wrong end of a magnifying glass.

When photographers get beyond copying the achievements of others, or just repeating their own accidental first successes, they learn that they do not know where in the world they will find pictures. Nobody does. Each photograph that works is a revelation to its supposed creator.

That feeling of finishedness does not come all at once, and it is not easily won, but I think once you get there it is hard to go back.

I remember doing "As Cool As I Am" and Steve Miller, the producer, saying "I really hear a drum loop here. I want to play it for you." When I wrote it, I thought, "This isn't going to sound very folky. I don't think it's going to go with mandolins and banjos." Then he played the loop for me and it sounded right.

I think Balanchine and Robbins talk to God and when I call, he's out to lunch.

When you have that last piece of the jigsaw, everything will, I hope, be clear..." -Albus Dumbledore

Rene Char wrote somewhere, apropos poetry, that there are those who create and those who discover; they are too completely different worlds. Photograph also has two sides to it and thank goodness, I am only intersted in those who discover; I feel a certain solidarity with those who set out in a spirit of discovery; I think there is much more risk invovled in this than in trying to create images; and in the end, reality is more important.

Art is a little bit larger than life - it's an exhalation of life and I think you probably need a little touch of madness.

I think there's probably always been visions and voices, and these were variously ascribed to the divine or demonic or the muses. I think many poets still feel they depend on an inner voice, or a voice which tells them what to do.

Whatever we think out, whatever we take in hand to do, should be perfectly and finally finished, that the world, if it must alter, will only have to spoil it; we have then nothing to do but unite the severed, to recollect and restore the dismembered.

The whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind so that I can survey it at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What delight this is I cannot tell!

If there are questions then, of course, there are answers, but the final answer makes the questions seem absurd.

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.