125 Quotes by Bjork

People are always asking me about eskimos, but there are no eskimos in Iceland.

Nature is our chapel. (Meaning)

Usually when you see females in movies, they feel like they have these metallic structures around them, they are caged in by male energy.

Iceland sets a world-record. The United Nations asked people from all over the world a series of questions. Iceland stuck out on one thing. When we were asked what do we believe, 90% said, 'ourselves'. I think I'm in that group. If I get into trouble, there's no God or Allah to sort me out. I have to do it myself.

I never really understood the word ‘loneliness’. As far as I was concerned, I was in an orgy with the sky and the ocean, and with nature.

If you want to make something happen that hasn't happened before , you've got to allow yourself to make a lot of mistakes.

Now that rock is turning 50, it's become classical in itself. It's interesting to see that development.

I find it so amazing when people tell me that electronic music has no soul. You can't blame the computer. If there's no soul in the music, it's because nobody put it there.

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I have to re-create the universe every morning when I wake up, and kill it in the evening.

When I was a teenager in Iceland people would throw rocks and shout abuse at me because they thought I was weird. I never got that in London no matter what I wore.

There are certain emotions in your body that not even your best friend can sympathize with, but you will find the right film or the right book, and it will understand you.

It takes a long time to fully become who you are.

I've always had as many powerful, creative ladies in my life as I have men, and you could probably describe some of those relationships as romantic. I think everyone's bisexual to some degree or another; it's just a question of whether or not you choose to recognise it and embrace it. Personally, I think choosing between men and women is like choosing between cake and ice cream. You'd be daft not to try both when there are so many different flavours.

For a person as obsessed with music as I am, I always hear a song in the back of my head, all the time, and that usually is my own tune. I've done that all my life.

I don't expect people to get me. That would be quite arrogant. I think there are a lot of people out there in the world that nobody gets.

I'm a fountain of blood. In the shape of a girl.

If travel is searching and home what's been found, I'm not stopping. I'm going hunting.

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Everything that a guy says once, you have to say five times.

I do believe sometimes discipline is very important. I'm not just lying around like a lazy cow all the time.

I'm self-sufficient. I spend a lot of time on my own and I shut off quite easily. When I communicate, I communicate 900 per cent, then I shut off, which scares people sometimes.

The English can be a very critical, unforgiving people, but criticism can be good. And this is a country that loves comedy.

I'm going to prove the impossible really exists

It's invisible, what women do. It's not rewarded as much.

It's funny how the hippies and the punks tried to get rid of the conservatives, but they always seem to get the upper hand in the end.

There is this stereotype of Icelanders all believing in spirits, and I've played up to that a bit in interviews.

I never want to know the range of my voice. It has to be impulsive, and I don't want to kill the mystery.

I have written most of my melodies walking and I feel it is definitely one of the most helpful ways of sewing all of the different things in your life together and seeing the whole picture.

Emotions weren’t created to just lie around. You should experience things to the full. I’ve got a sense of the clock ticking. We have to feel all those things to the maximum. Like, I don’t eat a lot but I really love eating. And I like being precise and particular. There is a certain respect in that. If you can do your day depending on how you feel, and enjoy things as well.

Maybe it's just a personal thing, but I get so much grounding from Iceland because I know it's always going to be there. I have a very happy, healthy relationship with the country, so it's really easy to go everywhere because I always have Iceland to go back to. It's sort of a contradiction, but that's how it works somehow.

Singing is like a celebration of oxygen.

I definitely can feel the third or fourth feminist wave in the air, so maybe this is a good time to open that Pandora’s box a little bit and air it out.

Create a paradise anywhere you go.

There's more to Life than this

If I had a philosophy, it's that I support the beautiful side of anarchy.

Today has never happened and it doesn't frighten me.

I sometimes fall into the trap of doing what I think I should be doing rather than what I want to be doing.

Compared to America or Europe, God isn't a big part of our lives here. I don't know anyone here who goes to church when he's had a rough divorce or is going through depression. We go out into nature instead.

It seems that most the world is driven by the eye, right? They design cities to look great but they always sound horrible ... They design telephones to look great, but they sound horrible. I think it was about time that the other senses were celebrated.

Love is a two way dream.

I've always appreciated working with people I have chemistry with, who are friends, and where you feel that the work is growing while you are getting to know each other better.

Seventy per cent humidity is ideal for vocal cords.

I'm a whisper in water.

I guess I'm quite used to not being understood rather than being understood.

There's no map to human behaviour.

I’ve been traveling in Guatemala in the rainforest, and here all these houses are made of sticks. It seems so easy to make one.

I love hiking in Iceland most, there are lots of brilliant paths.

There's something about the rhythm of walking, how, after about an hour and a half, the mind and body can't help getting in sync.

You're a coward if you don't stand up. Not for you, but for women. Say something.

I get obsessed by little nerdy things in my corner that no one else is interested in.

People are always going to need physicality; they're going to want to meet other people even more. I've got faith in the physical angle. People have their needs. They won't forget about them.

I feel like the people from Iceland have a different relationship with their country than other places. Most Icelandic people are really proud to be from there, and we don’t have embarrassments like World War II where we were cruel to other people.

Being a musician is very easy. My house is full of musical instruments. There's a lot of music, always.

What comes first? The melody, always. It's all about singing the melodies live in my head. They go in circles. I guess I'm quite conservative and romantic about the power of melodies. I try not to record them on my Dictaphone when I first hear them. If I forget all about it and it pops up later on, then I know it's good enough. I let my subconscious do the editing for me.

As a singer-songwriter, what I do is write about how the human feels.

I don't like records that are the same from beginning to end, that are too styled and slick. Everything is so designed and airbrushed and Botoxed, it makes us think, 'Oh, everybody's perfect except me. Everything's smooth except me.' But nothing is smooth.

It's incredible how nature sets females up to take care of people, and yet it is tricky for them to take care of themselves.

You shouldn't let poets lie to you.

I find it very difficult to draw a line between what's sex and what isn't. It can be very, very sexy to drive a car, and completely unsexy to flirt with someone at a bar.

Declare independence, don't let them do that to you!

When I was 20, political music was the uncoolest thing on earth. But when Bush got elected, that was the first time I started actually reading the news.

There's definitely, definitely, definitely, no logic to human behaviour. There's no map And a compass Wouldn't help at all

I'm a little nervous. Definitely. Especially coming from an album like Biophilia, which was about the universe. This is more of a traditional singer/songwriter thing. When I started writing, I fought against it. I thought it was way too boring and predictable. But most of the time, it just happens; there's nothing you can do. You have to let it be what it is.

I would like to teach music. It's weird the way they teach music in schools like Julliard these days.

I'm not that keen on fierce dictatorship. I think that sort of the point of working with somebody is them coming up with stuff and feeling free to do that.

I'd done three solo albums in a row, and that's quite narcissistic.

Solar power, wind power, the way forward is to collaborate with nature - it's the only way we are going to get to the other end of the 21st century.

People that complete other people's vision are understated.

I always wanted to be a farmer. There is a tradition of that in my family.

Maybe I'll be a feminist in my old age.

When I write a song, I see a tunnel, and then the chorus is an open space, or the bassline is doing this shape. I see songs as a more of a geometric, spacial experience.

I feel the 21st century is another new age. Not only can we collaborate again with nature, but we have to. It's an emergency.

Believe it or not, I'm a bit clumsy with technology. It's probably why I'm so excited about the touchscreen - even an idiot can use it!

I do try and wear stuff by unknown designers, and I make sure I pay because if nothing else I have money.

Our times seem to be so much about redefining where we are physical and where we're not. For me, it is really exciting to take the cutting edge technology and take it as far as it can get virtually, use it to describe/control the musicology or the behavior of raw natural elements, and then plug it with a sound source which is the most acoustic one there is - like gamelan and pipe organ. So you get the extremes: very virtual and very physical. In that way you shift the physicality.

What we are saying is, we've got three aluminum factories, let's work with that, we cannot change that. Why not have the Icelandic people who are educated in high-tech and work already in those factories in the higher paid jobs, why not let them build little companies who are totally Icelandic with the knowledge they have? Then they get the money and it stays in the country. Then we can support the biotech companies and the food companies and all these clusters. I think that if you want to be an environmentalist in Iceland, these are the things you've got to be putting your energy into.

I was very aware when I went to the Academy Awards that it would probably be my first and last time. So I thought my input should really be about fertility, and I thought I'd bring some eggs.

National Geographic contacted me about getting on their label, and I was like, 'Wow, I want to be label mates with the sharks and lemurs!'

I'm back at my cliff still throwing things off i listen to the sounds they make on their way down i follow him with my eyes 'till they crash imagine what my body would sound like slamming against those rocks.

I'm no buddhist, but this is fu**ing enlightmentment

I'm a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl . . . leave me now return tonight tide will show you the way if you forget my name you will go astray like a killer whale trapped in a bay

The reason I do interviews is because I'm protecting my songs.

It's a sign that you have a good work relationship if you don't have to analyze. That's usually a good sign within creative work.

Part of me is probably more conservative than people realise. I like my old string quartets, I don't like music that's trippy for trippy's sake.

You want people to take risks, and OK, they fail, but you don't get the great stuff unless people are willing to risk and not play it safe. And maybe the Icelandic characteristic is better harnessed in these places than on the stock market.

What probably confuses people is they know a lot about me, but it quite pleases me that there's more they don't know.

I don't really have an ego. I'm not that bothered.

But I'm not interested in politics. I lose interest the microsecond it ceases to be emotional, when something becomes a political movement. What I'm interested in is emotions.

I'm not as religious as some people about "the album." To be honest, that was a product of a format. You had vinyl, and you could fit five songs on each side, and that's 45 minutes. You had A-side songs and B-side songs; I always loved the first song on side B. And there's nothing wrong with that. Prog albums of the 70s adapted to that format very much. But not all musicians want to create 45 minutes of music that has to be listened to in chronological order.

Over the last 10 years, there have been so many incredible albums created in bedrooms by people who never would've gotten an album deal. People keep thinking of professional music studios like they've always been this way for hundreds of years, but they're very much a child of the 70s. Even the interior is very 70s. Everything's brown and it's wood - somebody told me the wood panels are all by the same company. We're always mourning things that have died. It's a bit much sometimes. These studios have no fresh air, and there's this unwritten rule that they don't have windows, either.

I think choosing between men and women is like choosing between cake and ice cream. You'd be daft not to try both when there are so many different flavors.

There have been so many articles written in the papers that want to just eliminate the environmental values business and just build aluminum factories now. But there have been an equal amount of articles of people saying listen, you just went on a money binge, are you gonna go on another binge now?

There's so many songs about heartbreak that exist this in the world, because music is somehow the perfect medium to express something like this.

All we had ever heard about record company people is that they were vampires and criminals...and they killed Elvis Presley.

The relationship changes as you learn more about people, and the work sort of takes on its own life. I enjoy this very much.

If you can make nature and technology friends, then you can make everyone friends; you can make everyone intact. That's what women do a lot - they're the glue between a lot of things.

When I was 18, science, physics, and math were my favorite. I was a bit of a nerd - the only girl with a lot of boys at chess championships.

I have nothing against Kanye West. Help me with this - I'm not dissing him - this is about how people talk about him. With the last album he did, he got all the best beatmakers on the planet at the time to make beats for him. A lot of the time, he wasn't even there. Yet no one would question his authorship for a second.

I think after Iceland's independence in 1944, we were not very sure of ourselves and our confidence was really low. It took one generation to sort of get over that. I'm second generation. My parents were born in 1945-46. Our movement at the punk times was like, we can sing in Icelandic, we are strong.

I'm not sure if it's because I'm older and I'm thinking about family more, but I'm trying to set up this thing where I can play in one city for a month, and then write music for a couple months, then play in another city for a month, write music for a month. Just so it's not these two schizophrenic, Jekyll and Hyde kind of things; you don't have to be this monster. You get inspired and you can go write one song from that, and then you go back and play a few shows. If I could've done that in the 90s, I would have.

What's happening now in Iceland is we grew and grew and grew from being one of the poorest nations in the world to being one of the richest. And then within the past 10 years Iceland discovered the stock market and it just went, went, went, went, went. I think it hit a roof and it's just crashed. Just a small percentage of the nation did a lot of damage.

I'm not very good at doing two things at the same time. I've never been good at the walk and bubblegum thing. I've been doing this 16 hours a day. I haven't had a day off. But it's very exciting, too, just to meet all these people doing really fertile stuff. It's sort of where I come from anyway, hanging out with people who believe in something incredible.

I feel Icelandic people are really good at gathering together information and brain power. We're better at that than some kind of Las Vegas money gambling. I mean, I really admire the characteristics in Icelandics, this adventureism. We are famous for it. We are addicted to risk to the point of being foolhardy. And I think that is great in brain power stuff.

With tons of chaotic supply on the internet, you're going to have people who become very good at being curators or stylists. It's the same sort of people that I used to go to record shops for - I knew if certain people recommended something, it would be good. There's always going to be those people. It just depends on what they're called: curators or radio jockeys or bloggers.

I want to support young girls who are in their 20s now and tell them: You're not just imagining things. It's tough. Everything that a guy says once, you have to say five times. Girls now are also faced with different problems. I've been guilty of one thing: After being the only girl in bands for 10 years, I learned - the hard way - that if I was going to get my ideas through, I was going to have to pretend that they - men - had the ideas.

People ask me questions like, "Oh, you look so theatrical in your photographs. Is that what you're like when you walk down the street?" It's like, "Of course not." It's such a silly question - it's like being theatrical is a crime.

In 2008, I was more just thinking about using the touchscreen for writing the songs. From there I started thinking about how I visualised music.

I'm not going to talk like I know about politics, because I'm a total amateur, but maybe I can be a spokesperson for people who aren't normally interested in politics.

Pedaling through the dark currents, I find an accurate copy. A blue print of the pleasure in me.

I learned what a lot of women have to do is make the guys in the room think it was their idea, and then you back them up.

I just feel like making things solar-powered and wind-powered should be as easy as using an iPad.

Feminists bore me to death. I follow my instinct and if that supports young girls in any way, great. But I'd rather they saw it more as a lesson about following their own instincts rather than imitating somebody.

If nothing else, I have money.

How could I be so immature to think you could replace the missing elements in me. How extremely lazy of me.

The reason I do photographs is to help people understand my music, so it's very important that I am the same, emotionally, in the photographs as in the music. Most people's eyes are much better developed than their ears. If they see a certain emotion in the photograph, then they'll understand the music.

People from the rock and roll world have felt for years that electronic music had no soul, but now electronic music can not only have soul but have all the shapes in the world.

Formats are just illusions, and it's about the relationship between the person that makes music and the person that listens to music. Every time there's a new format, the iron is hot, and you can mold it.

Icelandic people are really educated. But maybe we are at where the people in the States were 50 years ago, where they think that stuff that isn't done with a hammer or physical power is not a job. It's that backwards.

I've never done an album like this. With Biophilia, I was being like Kofi Annan - I had to be the pacifist to try to unite the impossible. Maybe that was a strange, personal job between me and myself, to show how overreaching I was being as a woman. The only way I could express that was by comparing it to the universe.

It wasn't just one journalist getting it wrong, everybody was getting it wrong.

I've written arrangements for choirs and strings in the past, but I usually write music with my voice or a keyboard and then I'll get someone who is good at writing scores to write it out. Or, if I have the luxury of time, I will go in a room and hear the people perform and then change it through what I hear, not on paper. I can read music OK, but I probably rebelled a little - music changes into something else when you read it.

I want to support young girls who are in their 20s now and tell them: You're not just imagining things. It's tough. Everything that a guy says once, you have to say five times.

In school, I guess I was a difficult, know-it-all type of student... I was always complaining that music education was too academic.

Over the last 10 years, there have been so many incredible albums created in bedrooms by people who never would've gotten an album deal.

Kids draw masterpieces - they're the best painters ever. I think the same with music. They could totally write amazing music if they just had the right tools. It's important at that age to set up something, and then maybe afterwards you can go study your violin for 500 hours a week. But at least in the beginning you know about the options.