Some excerpts from a recent interview with Brian Eno at The Great Discontent:
“The most important thing to remember is that you can’t help being original. Unless you constrain yourself into not being original. Every human being is original. But what you can do and what a lot of people end up doing is disguising the fact. They stop themselves from being original because it’s awkward or safer.”
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“I’ve always liked economy. The idea of seeing how much you could do with how little. That’s why Mondrian fascinated me, you could describe his pictures almost in words, they’re so simple. And I think that’s why doo-wop fascinated me as well, because it was just a bunch of guys singing, most of the time, without any instruments at all. So, I always thought how incredible that you can get so much from so little… Trying to set up a challenge like that: What can I do with this little material, can I magic it in some way, can I make it magic?“
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“Everything requires attention, that’s the main thing to remember. Every new thing you add requires attention and I think the most important resource in the world right now is your attention. That’s why huge industries exist to capture it. Facebook, Google, everything exists to capture your attention and to monetize it in some way. So, my message to everyone now is don’t get a job if you can avoid it and look after your attention. Really pay attention to your attention. Where is it? What’s it doing? How often in the day do you actually have time when your attention is not being taken up by somebody else or by something else?
My feeling is this, you are either in input mode, which means you’re taking stuff in like you’re eating, you’re eating the world in some way, in your brain. Or you’re in output mode, which is where the stuff that’s in you is coming up and has a chance of getting out to the world. And so I realized that I wanted to give more time to that second process of letting stuff bubble up from inside me.”
— (via)