Brian Eno Quotes

To me, the best projects are the ones where you have a pretty good idea of what the spine of it's gonna be, but then all sorts of things happen that you could've never predicted, and those are the magic moments of the films.

The thing about the creative process is it's so chaotic.

The real artist's work is a surprise to himself.

I've always been somebody who, when I started a picture, never knew what the next picture would be.

Artwork is not like a commercial business; there is no such thing as a schedule for art. You can't hurry art.

I never know what I'm going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I'm just the middleman.

I love to be creative.

I believe in creative work.

You never know what an artist is going to create next.

The creative processes are so mysterious.

You know, we never really know what we're going to write next. Which is part of the excitement when we go in and do a new album. No battle plan, we just go in and do it and what comes out, comes out.

I enjoy being creative.

You just gotta record stuff and move on and make new material. Painters don't wait until they're in some specific gallery before they move on to the next painting.

Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.

Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record.

A book of mine is always a matter of fate. There is something unpredictable about the process of writing, and I cannot prescribe for myself any predetermined course.

When recording, whatever you first think about, you come out with something totally different at the end of it. Whatever plans you have you throw away, because it's always going to end up sounding pretty different from what you initially thought of. I probably only had about five or six songs when I started, and it just sort of flowed from that.

If you understand a painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.

One never knows what one is going to do. One starts a painting and then it becomes something quite different.

Everything stems from real experiences but I do also have a very vivid imagination. A song lyric gets easily carried away with itself and can end up somewhere I'd never have predicted.

When I stand before a canvas, I never know what I'll do, and I am the first one surprised at what comes out.

I have an idea of a set of colors and see what I have. A lot of things, the best, more magical things in the paintings just sort of happen. They aren't things I thought of in advance. They are more things I am given. What paint does, in watercolor more than oil but it happens in oil too, are things one never expects if you work freely. I suppose I learned a lot coming to this after years of playing improvisational music. I have to trust my intuition and I work in the moment, when that moment seems to be happening. And to leave it alone when it is not.

It's a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

Anything that propels me to create, like [my book, Straight Walk]. It kept me inspired for almost four years.

A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before.