Brian Eno Quotes

Very often the music comes first.

I really admire songwriters or any kind of writer, painter or artist that says, "I'm going to get up at 8 o'clock in the morning and spend this time to this time creating." I do that sometimes, but the songs I like the best come as gifts from somewhere. It's almost like you didn't do anything, like you can't take credit for it because you sat down and the melody and words came out.

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.

It is always the same with me; only when I experience something do I compose, and only when composing do I experience! After all, a musician's nature can hardly be expressed in words.

Any composer who is gloriously conscious that he is a composer must believe that he receives his inspiration from a source higher than himself.

I'm a great believer in letting lyrics just flow out, wherever they come from.

After it's finished, sometimes I can trace a path that goes back to the possible source of inspiration.

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.

I get inspired at different times and in different ways.

People ask what was the first piece of music I wrote. There was no first piece.

Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.

I just get an idea and then all of a sudden I've got a song.

That's the beauty of creativity. It comes from the ether. I like to think, sometimes, it's like I haven't written it, it's more like I just reached up and grabbed it from somewhere. That song, 'Song of the Red Rock Mountain,' is one of them. I recorded it and thought, 'Where did that come from?'

I've never been able to understand where great artists come from.

The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.

It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing.

My son - and what's a song? A thing begot within a pair of minutes, thereabout, a lump bred up in darkness.

Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had.

In scoring, I usually start with a sound or group of sounds, searching out what feels right.

There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture - that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within.

I always feel my work is a chemical reaction between me and the world, wherever I happen to be.

Works of art inspire me to compose.

What's cool about making music is when you create a record, it comes from somewhere.

I usually start with a lyric and see where that takes me.

I feel the most natural thing is for music to come that way because it's sort of like poetry. Though I do think with poets that I like, like Charles Olson or Ezra Pound, they were rewriting constantly, until the poem becomes a diamond.But with music I don't really feel that way.