Brian Eno Quotes

I write a lot about the past because I really see things clearly in hindsight.

Becoming an artist does not merely mean learning something, acquiring professional techniques and methods. Indeed, as someone has said, in order to write well you have to forget the grammar.

I've never been one of those guys who storyboards every frame, because that would take away some of the mystery and some of the fun.

The kind of writing that matters most to me is something you don't learn about. It's constantly coming out of what I don't know rather than what I do know.

It's funny: when you make a film, you always look back, and there are always crucial decisions that get made. You look back, and at the time they don't seem like it, but you look back, and you see they were absolutely fundamental.

There's a tendency when we write history to do it with the power of hindsight and then assume almost god-like knowledge that nobody living through history has.

I never map things out in advance. It would be better if I did and more economical in terms of time, but I've found that if you work out a plot line from beginning to end, at the beginning it becomes very rational.

Creative processes are always very opaque. Afterwards, you tend to pretend that everything was planned and it was a strategy, but it was not like that at all.

We have to learn from the past.

I don't think we ever really think about it when we're doing it, because if you sort of go in with a plan of attack, it tends to take away the natural rhythm of songwriting.

When I wrote 'Grand Illusion,' I was making it up as we went along. I wrote this stuff and tried to do the best job I could.

I believe we need to learn from our past.

We learn from history. That's what it's all about.

It might be the history major in me, but I look to the past when I try to construct my fictional futures.

A lot of things in history are timing, and it's very peculiar because in retrospect things [and] people can look more brilliant or necessary than they actually were.

I knew I was going to be composing. It all makes sense in retrospect. But you don't know while you're in the process of improvising your life.

I feel with writing, so much of the time, I don't know how to tap in and be spontaneous and alive on a daily basis. So I don't write every day. I'm just not disciplined, and I can't be in the groove most of the time. I feel like I'm in the groove ten days a year or something. But with reading and research, I feel like I have this incredibly instinctive pleasure-driven process that ends up working out for me and inspiring me. It's almost like a maze, like I know eventually I'll hit the heart of my play if I read enough books.

No two books come out the same way. Some I write by the seat of my pants; others are planned in minute detail.

I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren't overplan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing.

So yeah, it's nothing that I'm doing on purpose, I just think that the more records, the more songs that I write, the more records that I make, you're obviously going to fall into a specific style and thank God it's a style that people are into.

I think it's really important to not talk about how you're going to release something until you've finished it. People are like, "What are we going to make? What are we going to do with it?" and it's just like, "I don't know, we're just making music. Then we'll talk." You can't always write something you're happy with; you can't force it.

I don't write with an outline. I don't often know what I'm going to do as I'm writing. And I do everything by feel and by instinct.

The most fertile source of insight is hindsight.

Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.

When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery.