Top 186 Quotes & Sayings by Bjork - Page 3

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.

Americans are so dumb!

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.

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

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.

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 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.

[As a kid] I felt it was really weird that music schools behaved like a conveyor belt to make performers for those symphony orchestras. If you were really good and practiced your violin for a few hours a day for ten years you might be invited to this VIP elite club. For me music was not about that. It is about freedom and expression and individuality and impulsiveness and spontaneity. It wasn't so Apollonian; it was more Dionysian.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 have always had a certain song in my head, a certain chemistry of sounds.

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.

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 am a grateful grapefruit.

It's nice and quiet but soon again starts another big riot!

I miss you, but I haven't met you yet!

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'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.

I am grateful... grapefruit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I thought I could organise freedom/How Scandinavian of me.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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'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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

There's more to Life than this

Icelandic peoples were the ones who memorized sagas... We were the first rappers of Europe.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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'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

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

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.

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