Top 33 Danish Quotes

I hope, then, that every one who sees ‘The Danish Girl’ might be galvanized themselves to lead more authentic lives. How much lovelier would the world be then?

When my career in hotels was taking off in the Nineties, I went to work as a head baker in Cyprus, where I was making Danish pastries every day. I can remember that the head chef was always on my back to put more seasonal fruits in with the creme patissiere. I’d even make them with rhubarb.

I’m not a great fan of monarchy in general, but I have to say the Danish monarchy is closer to the people; it’s not as stuffy as the English one.

Beer is the Danish national drink, and the Danish national weakness is another beer.

I think Danish girls might be a little more chill – at least, that’s what I’ve heard from people who’ve also dated American girls.

As brilliant as those dark Scandi noir dramas are, not everything has to be shot down a Danish alleyway.

When I was growing up, my idea of a writer was someone like Sven Hassel, that mysterious Danish author who wrote thrillers about men clambering over walls and getting tangled in barbed wire.

I used to love Danish. My father used to make a Boston cream pie. You never see that anymore.

When we started making ‘Borgen,’ no one had any idea it would have any appeal outside Denmark. No one expected it to follow the success of ‘The Killing’ because it’s basically all about Danish politics.

There are, of course, always painters whom I admire and find fascinating. I’ve often thought, ‘Goodness, if I could paint like the Danish Golden Age painters, the early 19th century painters, the way they could paint a landscape – absolutely beautiful.’

A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian – yet we understand Chekhov and the others.

Danish is a different language, even though Danish people understand Swedes, and very few Swedes understand Danish.

I wanted to be a cartoonist, but there was no cartoon academy. So I enrolled in the Royal Danish Art Academy School of Architecture. But then I really got smitten by architecture.

It’s funny because when I’m outside Australia, I never get to do my Australian accent in anything. It’s always a Danish accent or an English accent or an American accent.

There’s a Danish architecture firm called BIG. I love architecture, and I always check out their work; they’re very good at reimagining the way we live. They put the human experience as the focus, with access to air and outdoor space.

I discovered I’m 60 per cent Viking. Well, more Danish, I suppose. I’m also two-and-a-half per cent Neanderthal.

I don’t feel that I’m strictly Danish; I don’t feel that my sense of humor is strictly Danish or my human sensibility is strictly Danish.

I’ve never played a Dane in a movie. I’ve had offers to be in Danish movies, including for some good directors, but I either had a job at the time or, when I was available, the movie just didn’t happen. Hopefully someday I’ll do one.

If I had to reflect on the finest classical male ballet dancers of my time, Vladimir Vasiliev of the Bolshoi and the Danish dancer Eric Bruhn were, I feel, without peer.

My dad’s from Zimbabwe, and my mom is Danish, Irish, and Norwegian, so I have influences from a lot of different places.

You know, for a painter, I was an assistant, and then he knew a lot of movie people. So, how do you say in English, I was an extra. I’m in a lot of Danish pictures as an extra.

I remember dawn coming up over the Strait of Malacca; ragamuffin kids on the dock in Sumatra laughing as they pelted us with bananas; collecting dead flying fish off the deck and bringing them to our sweet, fat, toothless Danish cook to fry up for breakfast.

I shot a Metallica video in Hollywood, and there were, like, 100 people on set. There was even a guy there to put antiseptic gel on my hands. Amazing. If I asked for that on a Danish set, they’d probably kick me out of the country.

I was raised speaking English and Spanish. And I also speak Danish. And I can get by in French and Italian. I’ve acted in Spanish and English, but when something has to do with emotions, sometimes I feel I can get to the heart of the matter better in Spanish.

In 2007 and 2008, the first two Danish ships were hijacked. I started to research it. I’ve had the idea of writing in this arena for a long time, but I could never find the angle of what kind of story.

I was super happy when I went to Cannes Film Festival – I got a full sponsorship from my favourite Danish brand, Mads Norgaard.

English is full of Scandinavian words. Margate, Ramsgate, Billingsgate, any town with a ‘gate’ on it takes their suffix from the Danish word ‘gade’ which simply means ‘street.’

I want my words to survive translation. I know when I write a book now I will have to go and spend three days being intensely interrogated by journalists in Denmark or wherever. That fact, I believe, informs the way I write – with those Danish journalists leaning over my shoulder.

Furniture manufacturing in plastics requires very costly machinery, which the Danish market is not big enough to justify. Or so they say. But show me a plastics manufacturer who dares to take on the experiment.

We have had such a letter movement on two occasions in Denmark when more than a quarter of the adult Danish population participated. Such an achievement, however, demands a really great effort and also a great deal of money.

That’s a lovely starting point for me as an actor: the question of what will we – or can we – do with this lot of years with which we’re blessed? More than my other films, ‘The Danish Girl’ is about the gigantic risks involved in being true to one’s self.

‘The Danish Girl’ was published in 2000. Then it, too, would disappear, as most books do. It fell out of print almost everywhere. I wrote other books and, as an editor, worked on dozens more. Yet always, Lili stayed with me.

Danish film is spreading in a fantastic way.