Brian Eno Quotes

That word 'fantasy' - I hardly ever hear it in the world of design. And that's very strange. You should hear it a lot. I think fantasy is a very important value that designers and artists should bring to the world.

Telling people how to be creative is easy - being creative is difficult.

I've been playing piano my whole life but I'd never tried to understand how compositions are made really. Try to imagine if you'd loved paintings your whole life but had never painted one. My aspiration now is just to understand. I don't have professional pretensions. I've learned so much. So many things I've been doing in the visual, two-dimensional painting world parallel many of the inner working of music - how intervals resolve into each other, harmonic rhythm, tonal things - there's a whole vocabulary that overlaps. Sometimes people see pianos in my works - that I never think.

I was listening to Tommy Chong talking about how he feels like there is like a creative flow happening and how certain people just know how to hook into the pipe. He played music with Jimi Hendrix and felt that he was personally connected to some higher intelligence or creativity.

Because it's so empowering, I want people to think about being entrepreneurial regardless. They don't have to start companies, but that's what makes them great employees, that's what makes them great citizens.

Obviously I've always loved singing and performing, but I fell in love with songwriting and then I enjoyed doing that for other people and getting coached. But then I kind of stumbled into the right group of people that really started to create some unique music for me and what I wanted to say, so then it made me want to be an artist.

Creative people... are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of 'divine madness,' to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks.

Creativity and the world of the imagination - the beauty of what we see as a child and the kind of play that we experience as a child - can be a way for us to survive tough times.

I am rather like a travelling salesman. I deal in ideas. I do much more for people than just paint them pictures.

Intelligence is not creative; judgment is not creative. If a sculptor is nothing but skill and mind, his hands will be without genius.

As Flannery O'Connor says, a person can choose what she writes but she can't choose what she makes live. Some people are really acoustic writers and so for them the secret revision is sound. Other people may revise in terms of the way a paragraph feels. There's a million ways to do it.

We have been doing things that are contrary; the things that people tell us won't work from the beginning. In fact, the only way to get ahead is to find errors in conventional wisdom.

Such compositions, line and color ideas, such wonders come into my mind and have stuck! - They will this time be dismissed only by being painted out.

A lot of times it's an asset to not know everything about everything... A lot of really great, innovative things have happened when people just didn't know it wasn't supposed to be possible.

Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think, Now I am going to write a Poem.

I love to paint. It's more of a hobby, but people love the paintings so much that I end up selling whatever I paint.

The people that weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience that I had when I painted it.

perfectionism is the enemy of art. Since art is essentially divine play, not dogged work, it often happens that as one becomes more professionally driven one also becomes less capriciously playful.

When I first started writing, a friend said I should be careful because I'm letting people know how to reach right in and play with my workings. And they do!

Creativity is about play and a kind of willingness to go with your intuition. It's crucial to an artist. If you know where you are going and what you are going to do, why do it? I think I learned that from the artists, from my grandmother, from all the creative people I've spent time with over the years.

People talk about generating my own work, but I don't really know how to go about that. There are certainly some roles in the theater I'd like to play but I don't know if I'll ever get to do it.

We’re taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a failure by doing something that’s very silly, unthinkable, naughty, dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely different path. It’s exciting, actually. To me, solving problems is a bit like a drug. You’re on it, and you can’t get off.

Music was not invented by the composer, but found.

In 1958 I finally found a large enough apartment on the Lower East Side, where I reverted to figure painting. I drew and painted quite a lot of figures and nudes. People would come and pose for me.

My ideas are not developed before I actually do the pieces.