Brian Eno

"I'm actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender."

"I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren't historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before."

"I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes."

"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."

"If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas."

"If you want to make computers that really work, create a design team composed only of healthy, active women with lots else to do in their lives, and give them carte blanche."

"Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you're listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music."

"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."

"People do dismiss ambient music, don't they? They call it 'easy listening,' as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to."

"Pop music can absorb so many peculiar talents, ranging from the completely nonmusical poseur who just uses music as a kind of springboard for a sense of style, to people who just love putting all that complicated stuff together, brick by brick, on their computers, to people like me who like playing conceptual games and being surprised."

"The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work."

"When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output."