Time & Perspective Quote by Brian Eno

Eno’s “forgetting” isn’t amnesia; it’s a work ethic disguised as a personality trait. Coming from a musician who helped invent whole sonic futures - glam’s art-school sheen in Roxy Music, the generative drift of ambient, the studio-as-instrument mindset - the line reads like a deliberate refusal of nostalgia as a creative drug. He’s not claiming he’s free of memory. He’s describing a discipline: treating yesterday’s solutions as today’s constraints.

The first clause is almost defensively blunt (“at all”), like he’s swatting away the rock culture expectation that artists endlessly reboot their classic period. Then he pivots to “always wanting,” which frames novelty less as inspiration and more as appetite, even compulsion. The kicker is “I make a point”: forgetting becomes a practice, something you schedule. That’s the subtext that makes the quote work. It takes a romantic myth (the visionary artist) and replaces it with a procedural one (the artist as systems designer). Eno’s career is full of methods for manufacturing surprise - Oblique Strategies, chance operations, self-imposed limitations - and this line slots neatly into that toolkit. Forgetting is a constraint you apply to yourself so you can’t reach for the easy riff, the familiar chord change, the proven persona.

There’s also a quiet provocation in “get things out of my mind.” In pop, authenticity is often sold as digging deeper into your feelings. Eno suggests the opposite: creativity sometimes requires subtraction, clearing mental cache, making space for accidents to matter.