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Things That Are Very Popular Are Not Taken Seriously, Because The Snobbish Side Of One Says, "well, If Everyone Likes It It Can't Be That Good." Whereas If Only I And A Couple Of Other People Like It, Then It Must Be Really Something Special.

-Brian Eno

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Things That Are Very

Brian Eno

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Things That Are Very Popular Are Not Taken Seriously, Because The Snobbish Side Of One Says, "well, If Everyone Likes It It Can't Be That Good." Whereas If Only I And A Couple Of Other People Like It, Then It Must Be Really Something Special.

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I Don't Like Celebrity Programmes - But I Do Like Programmes About How Ideas Are Formed And Evolve.

When You Sing With A Group Of People, You Learn How To Subsume Yourself Into A Group Consciousness Because A Capella Singing Is All About The Immersion Of The Self Into The Community. That's One Of The Great Feelings - To Stop Being Me For A Little While And To Become Us. That Way Lies Empathy, The Great Social Virtue.

The Only Value Of Ideology Is To Stop Things Becoming Showbiz.

The Time I Like Listening To Music Most On Headphones Is, I Have A Game I Play With My Brother, He's A Musician As Well.and He Sends Me Midi Files Of Keyboard Pieces. So, These Are Pieces Where I Just Get A Midi File; I Don't Know What Instrument He Was Playing Them On; I Know Nothing About His Section Of The Sound Of The Piece, And Then When I'm Sitting On Trains I Do A Lot Of Train Travel I Turn Them Into Pieces Of Music. And I Love To Do That; It's My Favorite Hobby.

I Love San Francisco And Brighton Has Something Of San Francisco About It. It's By The Sea, There's A Big Gay Community, A Feeling Of People Being There Because They Enjoy Their Life There.

I Hate Talking About Music, To Tell You The Truth.

I Want To Rethink Surrender As An Active Verb.

At The Beginning Of The 20th Century, The Ambition Of The Great Painters Was To Make Paintings That Were Like Music, Which Was Then Considered As The Noblest Art.

Feelings Are More Dangerous Than Ideas, Because They Aren't Susceptible To Rational Evaluation. They Grow Quietly, Spreading Underground, And Erupt Suddenly, All Over The Place.

I've Noticed A Terrible Thing, Which Is I Will Agree To Anything If It's Far Enough In The Future.

I Think Audiences Are Quite Comfortable Watching Something Coming Into Being.

My Kind Of Composing Is More Like The Work Of A Gardener. The Gardener Takes His Seeds And Scatters Them, Knowing What He Is Planting But Not Quite What Will Grow Where And When - And He Won't Necessarily Be Able To Reproduce It Again Afterwards Either.

The Whole Point Of Art, As Far As I’m Concerned, Is That Art Doesn’t Make Any Difference. And That’s Why It’s Important. Take Film: You Can Have Quite Extreme Emotional Experiences Watching A Movie, But They Stop As Soon As You Walk Out Of The Cinema. You Can See People Being Hurt, But Even Though You Feel Those Things Strongly, You Know They’re Not Real.

Sometimes You Recognize That There Is A Category Of Human Experience That Has Not Been Identified But Everyone Knows About It. That Is When I Find A Term To Describe It.

When Our Governments Want To Sell Us A Course Of Action, They Do It By Making Sure It's The Only Thing On The Agenda, The Only Thing Everyone's Talking About. And They Pre-load The Ensuing Discussion With Highly Selected Images, Devious And Prejudicial Language, Dubious Linkages, Weak Or False 'intelligence' And Selected 'leaks'.

I Never Wanted To Write The Sort Of Song That Said, 'look At How Abnormal And Crazy And Out There I Am, Man!'

Most Game Music Is Based On Loops Effectively.

Rationality Is What We Do To Organize The World, To Make It Possible To Predict. Art Is The Rehearsal For The Inapplicability And Failure Of That Process.

When I Went Back To England After A Year Away, The Country Seemed Stuck, Dozing In A Fairy Tale, Stifled By The Weight Of Tradition.

Art Is Not An Object, But A Trigger For Experience.

I Think Most Artists Would Be Happy To Have Bigger Audiences Rather Than Smaller Ones. It Doesn't Mean That They Are Going To Change Their Work In Order Necessarily To Get It, But They're Happy If They Do Get It.

I Have Lived In Countries That Were Coming Out Of Conflict: Ireland, South Africa, The Czech Republic. People There Are Overflowing With Energy.

Human Development Thus Far Has Been Fueled And Guided By The Feeling That Things Could Be, And Are Probably Going To Be, Better.

I Would Like To See A Future Where Artists Think That They Have A Right To Contemplate Things Like Global Warming.

I've Got A Feeling That Music Might Not Be The Most Interesting Place To Be In The World Of Things.

Something I’ve Realized Lately, To My Shock, Is That I Am An Optimist, In That I Think Humans Are Almost Infinitely Capable Of Self-change And Self-modification, And That We Really Can Build The Future That We Want If We’re Smart About It.

The Biology Of Purpose Keeps My Nose Above The Surface.

People Always Focus On People Like Me Who Use Synthesizers, Right, Which Are Explicitly Electronic And Therefore Obvious. "ah, Yes, That's Electronic Music." But They Don't Realize That So Is The Concept Of Actually Taking A Piece Of Extant Music And Literally Re-collaging It, Taking Chunks Out And Changing The Dynamics Radically And Creating New Rhythmic Structures With Echo And All That. That's Real Electronic Music, As Far As I'm Concerned.

You Shoot Your Arrow And Then You Paint Your Bulls Eye Around It, And Therefore You Have Hit The Target Dead Centre.

Painting, I Think It's Like Jazz.

Admirers Can Be A Tremendous Force For Conservatism.

There's A Kind Of Edge To What You're Doing, The Kind Of Leading Edge Of What You're Doing. Inside That Edge [are Elements You] Are Familiar With, And Are Probably Becoming Slightly Bored With, As Well, Over A Period Of Time. "i've Pulled That One Out Before. Oh, No, I Can't I'm Just Fed Up With That. Let's Do Something Else."and You Always Think "oh My God I've Never Done Anything At All Like That Before." But, Of Course, In Retrospect, And To An Outsider, They'll Say, "oh, Yeah That's Typical Eno.

Nothing So Dates An Era As Its Conception Of The Future.

If You Are Part Of A Religion That Very Strongly Insists That You Believe Then To Decide Not To Do That Is Quite A Big Hurdle To Jump Over. You Never Forget The Thought Process You Went Through. It Becomes Part Of Your Whole Intellectual Picture.

It Infuriates Me That Stuff From The Internet Routinely Doesn't Include All The Credits. Because As Soon As I Listen To Something, If I Like It, I Want To Know, "who's The Bass Player?" "who Did That?" "who's The Engineer On This?

Listening To Something Is An Act Of Surrender.

Saying That Cultural Objects Have Value Is Like Saying That Telephones Have Conversations.

I Love Good, Loud Speakers.

The Point About Working Is Not To Produce Great Stuff All The Time, But To Remain Ready For When You Can.

You Can't Really Imagine Music Without Technology.

I Always Use The Same Guitar; I Got This Guitar Years And Years Ago For Nine Pounds. It's Still Got The Same Strings On It.

I Enjoy Working With Complicated Equipment. A Lot Of My Things Started Just With A Rhythm Box, But I Feed It Through So Many Things That What Comes Out Sounds Very Complex And Rich.

I Make A Lot Of Pieces Of Music That I Never Release As Cds.

Lyrics Are Always Misleading Because They Make People Think That That's What The Music Is About.

Also Something That You Don't Have To Listen To From Beginning To End - You Can Enter At Any Point And Leave At Any Point.

All Cultures Have These Feelings About Non-functional Areas Of Activity. And The More Time People Have On Their Hands, The More They Commit It To Those Areas.

Most Big Concerts Sound Disgusting And Awful And Insultingly Bad. It's Like Going To The Cinema And Been Shown A Scratchy Film Which Is Upsidedown And The Bulb Had Gone On The Projector. The Quality Of Large-scale Live Music Is So Shocking.

I've Got Nothing Against Records - I've Spent My Life Making Them - But They Are A Kind Of Historical Blip.

A Lot Of The So-called Systems Composers Have This Thing That The System Is Always Right. You Don't Fiddle With It At All. Well, I Don't Think That. I Think The System Is As Right As You Judge It To Be. If For Some Reason You Don't Like A Bit Of It You Must Trust Your Intuition On That. I Don't Take A Doctrinaire Approach To Systems.

When I Work There Are Two Distinct Phases: The Phase Of Pushing The Work Along, Getting Something To Happen, Where All The Input Comes From Me, And Phase Two, Where Things Start To Combine In A Way That Wasn't Expected Or Predicted By What I Supplied. Once Phase Two Begins Everything Is Okay, Because Then The Work Starts To Dictate Its Own Terms. It Starts To Get An Identity Which Demands Certain Future Moves. But During The First Phase You Often Find That You Come To A Full Stop.

It Must Be Quite Mysterious To Some People Why I Bother To Carry On. Because, You Know, I Don't Sell That Many Records.

Repetition Doesn't Really Exist

Every Increase In Your Knowledge Is A Simultaneous Decrease. You Learn And You Unlearn At The Same Time. A New Certainty Is A New Doubt As Well.

What I Would Really Like To Do, If I Could Have A Sort Of Kingship For A Short Time And Organize The Group Of My Dreams - I Would Make One Group Which Would Be A Combination Of, Say, Parliament And Kraftwerk - Put Those Two Together And Say, "make A Record." Something That Would Be An Extraordinary Combination: The Weird Physical Feeling Of Parliament With This Strange, Rigid Stuff Over The Top Of It.

I Have These Headphones, Which Pretty Much Exclude Everything Else So That You Can Really Completely Control The Sound That You're Hearing. I Don't Use Them Very Much, I Have To Say. I Very Rarely Listen On Headphones.

One Of The Great Breakthroughs Of Evolution Theory Is That You Start With Simple Things And They Will Grow Into Complexity.

Well, I Am A Dilettante. It's Only In England That Dilettantism Is Considered A Bad Thing. In Other Countries It's Called Interdisciplinary Research.

I Believe That Singing Is The Key To Long Life, A Good Figure, A Stable Temperament, Increased Intelligence, New Friends, Super Self-confidence , Heightened Sexual Attractiveness, And A Better Sense Of Humor.

Self Confidence

I Hate The Rock Music Tradition. I Can't Bear It!

The Trouble Begins With A Design Philosophy That Equates 'more Options' With 'greater Freedom.'

When I Was Young, An Eccentric Uncle Decided To Teach Me How To Lie. Not, He Explained, Because He Wanted Me To Lie, But Because He Thought I Should Know How It's Done So I Would Recognise When I Was Being Lied To.

I Do Sometimes Look Back At Things I've Written In The Past, And Think, 'i Just Don't Remember Being The Person Who Wrote That.'

I See Tv As A Picture Medium Rather Than A Narrative Medium.

Nearly All The Things I Do That Are Of Any Merit At All Start Off Just Being Good Fun.

I Wanted To Use The Studio Like A Microscope For Sound, Which Is What Good Engineers Do.

In The Wake Of The Events Of 11 September 2001, It Now Seems Clear That The Shock Of The Attacks Was Exploited In America.

I Think Very Often Producers Are Really Trying To Repeat Things. When They Hear Something In The New Songs That They Recognize As Being A Bit Like Something That Was A Success On A Previous Record, They're Inclined To Encourage That.

The Tools Are Evolving, And People's Interests Are Evolving As Well. So, Suddenly People Like To Hear Bands, People Like Devendra Banhart Or The Xx, Bands That Make A Kind Of Virtue Of Sloppiness. That Isn't What They Would Describe What They're Doing, But The Fact Is They Make A Virtue Of The Sort Of Hand-made Nature Of What They're Doing.

If You Think Of The Way A Composer Or Say A Pop Arranger Works - He Has An Idea And He Writes It Down, So There's One Transmission Loss. Then He Gives The Score To A Group Of Musicians Who Interpret That, So There's Another Transmission Loss. So He's Involved With Three Information Losses. Whereas What I Nearly Always Do Is Work Directly To The Sound If It Doesn't Sound Right. So There's A Continuous Loop Going On.

You Can't Do Anything Interesting With Cutting-edge Technology Except Not Make It Cutting-edge.

In The 1960s, People Were Trying To Get Away From The Pop Song Format. Tracks Were Getting Longer, Or Much, Much Shorter.

Reggie Watts Is A Most Unusual Talent: A Huge Vocal Range, A Natural Musicality, And A Sidesplitting Wit. Is He A Comedian? A Singer? A Performance Artist? I've Seen Him A Few Times Since Then And I Still Can't Decide. Whatever, He Ain't Like Nobody Else.

The Prospect Of Music Being Detachable From Time And Place Meant That One Could Start To Think Of Music As A Part Of One's Furniture.

I Love The Sort Of Ambivalence Of This, The Ambiguity Of Something - Being, For Instance, In A Quite Busy Mexican Restaurant With One Of These Very Gentle Tracks Playing I Remember As Being Particularly Nice.

Often, I Think You Find That You're Enjoying Certain Things, You've Got This New Way Of Listening, And You Find That You Really Enjoy The Way That Sounds On It And The Way This Other Thing Sounds On It And The Way That Other Thing Sounds On It. So, You're Finding A New Pleasure That You Didn't Know About Before.

I Wish There Was A Serious Investigation Into Flying Saucers That Wasn't Conducted By Crackpots. Unfortunately Nearly All Of The People Who Are Interested In Them Kind Of Manufacture The Evidence To Fit The Theories Rather Than The Other Way Around. So It's Very Hard To Find Any Dispassionate Treatment Of Them. Maybe There Isn't Any Scientific Basis In Which Case That's Why You Never See Any Scientific Evidence.

Emotion Creates Reality, Reality Demands Action.

Of All The Things You Can Now Do, Which Do You Choose To Do?

I'm Fascinated By Musicians Who Don't Completely Understand Their Territory; That's When You Do Your Best Work.

All Music Has Political Dimensions Because It Suggests A Way Of Being.

I Despise Computers In Many Ways. I Think They’re Hopelessly Underevolved And Overrated.

Attention Is What Creates Value. Artworks Are Made As Well By How People Interact With Them - And Therefore By What Quality Of Interaction They Can Inspire.

Genius Is Individual, Scenius Is Communal.

You Don't Have To Act As If You Know What You're Doing

Everybody Is Entertained To Death.

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.

Most Of Those Melodies Are Me Trying To Find Out What Notes Fit, And Then Hitting Ones That Don't Fit In A Very Interesting Way.

I Remember When In The Early Days Of Rock'n'roll, When Everything Sounded Totally Different, All Amazing And Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah. Now You Can Play Me One Second Of Any Record From That Time, And I'll Say "1959" Or "1961." I Can Hear Precisely. It's Like It Has A Huge Date Stamp On It.

It's Nice, I Think, When People Use Your Music For Things You Didn't Think Of.

Try To Make Things That Can Become Better In Other People’s Minds Than They Were In Yours.

The First Velvet Underground Album Only Sold 10,000 Copies, But Everyone Who Bought It Formed A Band

It's Actually Very Easy For Democracy To Disappear.

One Of The Things You're Doing When You Make Art, Apart From Entertaining Yourself And Other People, Is Trying To See What Ways Of Working Feel Good, What Feels Right.

I Wanted To Get Rid Of The Element That Had Been Considered Essential In Pop Music: The Voice.

I Got An Amazing 10-cd Set, It's The Music That Alan Lomax Recorded In Haiti In 1936. And What's Incredible Is How Fantastic The Drummers Are And How Off-the-grid They Are. The Liveliness Is Astonishing; They're Just Totally Alive, These Recordings. It's Very Interesting, To Me, To Be Reminded Of That, That There Was A Time When Things Were Not That Tight.

I'm Always Interested In What You Can Do With Technology That People Haven't Thought Of Doing Yet.

Of Course, Like Anybody I Repeat Myself Endlessly, But I Don't Know That I'm Doing It, Usually.

I Mostly Used The Studio Devices, Because I Knew What They Had. Generally I Find I'm Happy To Use Whatever's Around. If There's Nothing There I'll Make Something. For Example, One Of The Things I Tried Doing Was Getting A Tiny Loudspeaker And Feeding The Instruments Off The Tape Through This Tiny Speaker And Then Through This Huge Long Plastic Tube - About 50 Feet Long - That They Used To Clean Out The Swimming Pool In The Place Where I Was Staying. You Get This Really Hollow, Cavernous, Weird Sound, A Very Nice Sound. We Didn't Use It Finally, But Nonetheless We Well Could Have.

Everything Good Proceeds From Enthusiasm.

I Got Interested In The Idea Of Music That Could Make Itself, In A Sense, In The Mid 1960s Really, When I First Heard Composers Like Terry Riley, And When I First Started Playing With Tape Recorders.

I Believe In Singing. I Believe In Singing Together.

In My Normal Life I'm A Very Unadventurous Person.

As Soon As I Hear A Sound, It Always Suggests A Mood To Me.

There Is A Sort Of Convergence Starting To Happen Between The Computer And Musical Instruments, But It's Still Quite A Long Way Off.

Songs That Don't Depend On Composition Depend Instead On Performance - So The Fire Has To Be There In The Playing.

Stop Thinking About Art Works As Objects, And Start Thinking About Them As Triggers For Experiences.

Be The First To Not Do What Nobody Has Ever Thought Of Not Doing Before.

Honor Thy Error As A Hidden Intention.

One Night, I Pissed Into An Empty Wine Bottle So I Could Continue Watching Monty Python, And Suddenly Thought 'i've Never Tasted My Own Piss,' So I Drank A Little. It Looked Just Like Orvieto Classico And Tasted Of Nearly Nothing

For The World To Be Interesting, You Have To Be Manipulating It All The Time.

One Way Of Working Is Just Bring A Group Of Totally Different Musicians Together And Encourage Them To Stick To Their Guns, Not To Do The Thing That Normally Happens In A Working Situation Where Everyone Homogenizes And Concedes Certain Points - So Eventually They're All Playing In Roughly The Same Style. I Wanted Quite The Opposite Of That. I Wanted Them To Accent Their Styles, So That They Pulled Away. So There Would Be A Kind Of Space In The Middle Where I Could Operate, And Attempt To Make These Things Coalesce In Some Way. In Fact Quite A Lot Of My Stuff Has Arisen From That.

As Struggles Go, Being An Artist Isn't That Much Of One.

Being An Artist

One Of The Interesting Things About Having Little Musical Knowledge Is That You Generate Surprising Results Sometimes; You Move To Places You Wouldn't If You Knew Better.

Once Music Ceases To Be Ephemeral - Always Disappearing - And Becomes Instead Material... It Leaves The Condition Of Traditional Music And Enters The Condition Of Painting. It Becomes A Painting, Existing As Material In Space, Not Immaterial In Time.

The Whole History Of Pop Music Had Rested On The First Person Singular, With Occasional Intrusions Of The Second Person Singular.

If You Had A Sign Above Every Studio Door Saying ‘this Studio Is A Musical Instrument’ It Would Make Such A Different Approach To Recording.

A Studio Is An Absolute Labyrinth Of Possibilities - This Is Why Records Take So Long To Make Because There Are Millions Of Permutations Of Things You Can Do. The Most Useful Thing You Can Do Is To Get Rid Of Some Of Those Options Before You Start

John Cage Made You Realise That There Wasn't A Thing Called Noise, It Was Just Music You Hadn't Appreciated.

It's Not The Destination That Matters. It's The Change Of Scene.

If You Watch Any Good Player, They're Using Different Parts Of Their Body And Working With Instruments That Respond To Those Movements. They're Moving In Many Dimensions At Once.

More And More I Find I Want To Be Living In A Big Here And A Long Now.

I Hate The Thought That Someone Had Picked Up One Of My Song Records And Was Really Excited About It, And Walks [out Of] A Record Shop With On Land And Is Disappointed Because It Isn't What They Wanted. So, I Try To Make Signs, Graphically And Visually, To Say To People "okay, This Is This Department Of My Work And This Is This Other Department Of My Work." And Of Course I'm Very Pleased If People Like All Of Them, But I Don't Want Them To Feel Deceived At Any Point.

Once You've Grown To Accept Something And It Becomes Part Of The System You've Inherited, You Don't Even Notice It Any Longer.

At The Party, Rob Partridge Said To Me, "you Gave Hope To Other Balding Men." My New Epitaph: "co-wrote A Couple Of Decent Songs And Went Bald Shamelessly."

The Micro-compositions Are The Pieces Themselves, But The Macro-composition Is The Whole Set Of Them And How It Moves From Track To Track And How The Titles Relate To One Another, For Example. Always When I Do Records Like This Of A Selection Of Instrumental Pieces - The Titles, To Me, Are Very Important.

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.

Put Out As Much As You Can. It Doesn't Do Anything Sitting On A Shelf.

Possessions Are A Way Of Turning Money Into Problems.

What Happens With Notation Is That It Reduces Things To A Language Which Isn't Necessarily Appropriate To Them. In The Same Way That Words Do, You Get A Much Cruder Version Of What Was Actually Intended.

I Belong To A Gospel Choir. They Know I Am An Atheist But They Are Very Tolerant.

A Big Ego Isn't Necessarily A Bad Thing. A Big Ego Means That You Have Some Confidence In Your Abilities, Really, And That You're Prepared To Take The Risk Of Trying Them Out.

I Still Do Mostly Listen To Cds. I Think That Every Format Really Is A Different Way Of Listening. If You Take A Different Sort Of Psychological Stance To It - Like, I Think The Transition From Vinyl To Cd Definitely Marked A Difference In The Way People Treated Music. The Vinyl Commands A Certain Kind Of Reverence Because It's A Big Object And Quite Fragile So You Handle It Rather Carefully, And It's Expensive So You Pay Attention To How It's Looked After.

Robert Fripp And I Will Be Recording Another Lp Very Soon. It Should Be Even More Monotonous Than The First One!

I Think That Sex, Drugs, Art And Religion Very Much Overlap With One Another And Sometimes One Becomes Another.

The Lyrics Are Constructed As Empirically As The Music. I Don't Set Out To Say Anything Very Important.

I Believe In Singing.

Part Of Me Likes A More Ragged, Jagged Guitar Sound Or Performance, But Our Work Might Not Have Been As Innovative Had We Followed In The Footsteps Of What Came Before. We Were Very Proud Of What We Had Hit On.

I've Never Used A Pc In My Life; I Don't Like Them.

Well, There Are Some Things That I Just Can't Get Out Of My Head, And They Start To Annoy Me After A While. Sometimes They're Of My Own Creation, As Well - And They're Just As Annoying. It's Not Only Other People's Ear Worms That Bug Me, It's My Own, As Well.

I Think It's A Myth That American Public Or Any Other Public Is So Stupid That They Need To Be Constantly Pricked.

In England And Europe, We Have This Huge Music Called Ambient - Ambient Techno, Ambient House, Ambient Hip-hop, Ambient This, Ambient That.

The Dominant Theory Coming Out Of Hollywood Is That Peoples' Attention Spans Are Getting Shorter And Shorter And They Need More Stimulation.

The Problem With Improvisation Is, Of Course, That Everyone Just Slips Into Their Comfort Zone And Does Sort Of The Easy Thing To Do, The Most Obvious Thing To Do With Your Instrument.

For Me It's Always Contingent On Getting A Sound-the Sound Always Suggests What Kind Of Melody It Should Be. So It's Always Sound First And Then The Line Afterwards.

If You Want To Make Someone Feel Emotion, You Have To Make Them Let Go. Listening To Something Is An Act Of Surrender.

I Think That's Very Significant That We're So Attached To The Idea Now Of - It Was Something I Advocated For Years, That You Can Make Music In Studios, Music Doesn't Have To Be Made As A Real-time Experience. But Now You See The Results Of That In People Who Are Completely Crippled Unless They Know That They Have The Possibility Of "cut And Paste" And "undo." And "undo" And "undo" And "undo" And "undo" And "undo" Again.

I Hate The Way Cds Just Drone On For Bloody Hours And You Stop Caring.

I Can See The Use And Value Of Religion, Just As I Can See The Use Of Mud Wrestling, Yoga, Astronomy And Sadomasochism. But I Reject The Idea That You Can't Be A Deep Human Being Without It Or Any Of Them.

When I've Finally Got The Title, I Think, "okay, Yes, Now I Know Where We Are. Now I Know What It Is. Fine, That Must Be Finished Or Nearly Finished.

Whenever You Listen To A Piece Of Music, What You Are Actually Doing Is Hearing The Latest Sentence In A Very Long Story You’ve Been Listening To - All The Pieces Of Music You’ve Ever Heard.

Instead Of Shooting Arrows At Someone Elses Target, Which Ive Never Been Very Good At, I Make My Own Target Around Wherever My Arrow Happens To Have Landed. You Shoot Your Arrow And Then You Paint Your Bulls Eye Around It, And Therefore You Have Hit The Target Dead Centre.

American Television Really Is Pathetic.

American Television

I Do Love Being In My Studio. Especially At Night.

Every Collaboration Helps You Grow.

I Think Generally Playing Live Is A Crap Idea. So Much Of Stage Work Is The Presentation Of Personality, And I've Never Been Interested In That.

Complexity And Intelligence Grow From Simplicity, Not From Greater Complexity.

Anything Popular Is Populist, And Populist Is Rarely A Good Adjective.

Some People Say Bowie Is All Surface Style And Second-hand Ideas, But That Sounds Like A Definition Of Pop To Me.

I'm Kind Of An Evangelical Atheist.

Whatever You Now Find Weird, Ugly, Uncomfortable And Nasty About A New Medium Will Surely Become Its Signature... The Excitement Of Grainy Film, Of Bleached-out Black And White, Is The Excitement Of Witnessing Events Too Momentous For The Medium Assigned To Record Them.

Black And White

All The Best Lyrics Are Written In Ten Minutes.

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.

When People Censor Themselves They're Just As Likely To Get Rid Of The Good Bits As The Bad Bits.

People Tend To Play In Their Comfort Zone, So The Best Things Are Achieved In A State Of Surprise, Actually.

One Often Makes Music To Supplement One's World.

The Difficulty Of Always Feeling That You Ought To Be Doing Something Is That You Tend To Undervalue The Times When You’re Apparently Doing Nothing, And Those Are Very Important Times.

There Are Certain Sounds That I've Found Work Well In Nearly Any Context. Their Function Is Not So Much Musical As Spatial: They Define The Edges Of The Territory Of The Music.

The Basis Of Computer Work Is Predicated On The Idea That Only The Brain Makes Decisions And Only The Index Finger Does The Work.

With All Fashion, What We Do Is Play At Being Somebody Else. We Play At Inhabiting Another Kind Of World.

Cultural Objects Have No Notable Identity Outside Of That Which We Confer Upon Them. Their Value Is Entirely A Product Of The Interaction That We Have With Them.

Perhaps When Music Has Been Shouting For So Long, A Quieter Voice Seems Attractive.

In Terms Of What Has Been Happening Recently, There Have Been, I Think, Some Really Interesting New Instruments That Have Come Out That Sort Of Show Me The Direction Of The Future. Korg Has Introduced The - They've Had A Whole Series Now Of These Things Called Kaoss Pads. They're Wonderful Because They Do Get Your Muscles Working Again. And What Djs Do, Of Course, With Their Dj Turntables Now, The Cd Turntables, Which Have Pitch Change And Speed Change And Everything Else. They're Doing Something That I Think Is Interestingly Physical.

You Feel As If You're Not Living A Full Life. Which, Of Course, Is Why - It's My Theory About Why So Many People Who Are Heavily Into Computers Are Also Into Extreme Sports And S&m. It's Because Their Bodies Are Crying Out For Some Kind Of Action.

The Philosophical Idea That There Are No More Distances, That We Are All Just One World, That We Are All Brothers, Is Such A Drag! I Like Differences.

The Most Important Thing In A Piece Of Music Is To Seduce People To The Point Where They Start Searching.

It's Easy To Forget That Your Best Work Is Done When Your Attention Is Fully Engaged.

Good Teachers Realise That The Students Are The Antenna; They Are Sensing Things That The Teachers Don't Yet Sense.

The Thing That Obsesses Me More Than Anything Is Waste - The Waste Of Human Intelligence And Creativity.

Any Constraint Is Part Of The Skeleton That You Build The Composition On - Including Your Own Incompetence.

I'm Bloody Awful At Multi-tasking.

I Think One Of My Pursuits Over The Years Is Trying To Answer The Question Of 'what Else Can You Do With A Voice Other Than Stand In Front Of A Microphone And Sing?'

The Trouble With New Age Music Is That There's No Evil In It.

The Reason I Don't Tour Is That I Don't Know How To Front A Band. What Would I Do? I Can't Really Play Anything Well Enough To Deal With That Situation.

I Often Work By Avoidance.

The Artists Of The Past Who Impressed Me Were The Ones Who Really Focused Their Work.

Some People Are Very Good At Being 'stars' And It Suits Them. I'm Grudging About It And I Find It Annoying.

When You Look Back On A Historical Period Of Music, It Seems So Obvious To You What The Characteristics Of It Are, But They're Not Obvious At The Time. So, When I Look Back At My Own Work, I Could Easily Write A Very Convincing Sort Of Account Of It That Made It Look Like I Had Planned It All Out From Day One And That This Led Logically To That And Then I Did This And Then That Followed Quite Naturally From That. But That's Not How It Felt.

We're Going Through This Super-uptight Era, Which I Think Comes Entirely From Literacy, Actually. It's The Result Of Machines That Were Designed As Word Processors Being Used For Making Music.

The Great Benefit Of Computer Sequencers Is That They Remove The Issue Of Skill, And Replace It With The Issue Of Judgement

I Want To Make Things That Put Me In The Position Of Innocence, That Recreate The Feeling Of Innocence In You.

Composition Is A Way Of Living Out Your Philosophy And Calling It Art.

Once I Started Working With Generative Music In The 1970s, I Was Flirting With Ideas Of Making A Kind Of Endless Music - Not Like A Record That You'd Put On, Which Would Play For A While And Finish.

The Idea That Something Is Uncool Because It’s Old Or Foreign Has Left The Collective Consciousness.

If You've Spent A Long Time Developing A Skill And Techniques, And Now Some 14 Year-old Upstart Can Get Exactly The Same Result, You Might Feel A Bit Miffed I Suppose, But That Has Happened Forever.

With Devices My Technique Is Always To Hide The Handbook In The Drawer Until I've Played With It For A While. The Handbook Always Tells You What It Does, And You Can Be Quite Sure That If It's A Complex Device It Can Do At Least Fifteen Other Things That Weren't Predicted In The Handbook, Or That They Didn't Consider Desirable. It's Normally Those Other Things That Interest Me.

If I Had A Stock Of Fabulous Sounds I Would Just Always Use Them. I Wouldn't Bother To Find New Ones.

Even Though I'm Known As A Pop Musician, I Have A Seriousness About What I Do.

Lyrics Are The Only Thing To Do With Music That Haven't Been Made Easier Technically.

I've Always Thought That Art Is A Lie, An Interesting Lie. And I'll Sort Of Listen To The "lie" And Try To Imagine The World Which Makes That Lie True...what That World Must Be Like, And What Would Have To Happen For Us To Get From This World To That One.

You Just Make Different Music On A Computer. And You Can Make Wonderful Music On A Computer, But Don't Pretend That The Machinery Is Transparent. It Makes As Much Difference To What You're Doing As It Does If You Play An Acoustic Guitar As Opposed To A Kettledrum. You're Not Going To Make The Same Music.

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