Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness.
— Brian Eno
The way 'Lux' was made is that there are 12 sections in here, though two of them are joined together. So there are really 11 sections, in a sense, and each one uses five notes out of a palette of seven notes, and my palette is all the white notes on the piano. That was the original palette.
I'm a painter in sound.
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.
In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America.
If I tried to make a commercial album, it would be a complete flop. I have no idea what the world at large likes.
I suppose I am reluctant about being any sort of 'star' and I didn't particularly want to be portrayed as one.
I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.
I've had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I've often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.
The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.
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 got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.
I'm fascinated by musicians who don't completely understand their territory; that's when you do your best work.
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.
In my normal life I'm a very unadventurous person.
It's nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn't think of.
I've noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it's far enough in the future.
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.
I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me.
I'm often accused of being ahead of my time, but it's simply not true. The truth is that everybody else is behind.
Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.
I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.
One often makes music to supplement one's world.
I don't like celebrity programmes - but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.
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.
Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.
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.
Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better.
You can't really imagine music without technology.
I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, 'Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!'
I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.
The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.
I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.
Painting, I think it's like jazz.
Most people have no idea what something would sound like if it wasn't an MP3.
I think I've committed the one really bad English crime, which is I've risen above my station. I was supposed to be a pop star, and suddenly I'm claiming that I'm an artist of some kind.
I'm an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call 'the last illusion.' The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what's going on but that the planets know what's going on.
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.'
Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven't been made easier technically.
Some people are very good at being 'stars' and it suits them. I'm grudging about it and I find it annoying.
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.
I do love being in my studio. Especially at night.
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'm very opinionated.
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'm actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.
I'm bloody awful at multi-tasking.
Of course, like anybody I repeat myself endlessly, but I don't know that I'm doing it, usually.
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 dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.
