Top 50 Bjork Quotes

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.

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

I went through an anti-Establishment phase and thought we should get everything for free.

When I met Apple, I made it very clear that I am an old punk and I have never done commercials or been sponsored. And I wasn’t after their money.

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

Come on, I’m from Iceland; I don’t do hip-hop.

I get embarrassed listening to my last CDs. I’ve got a lot of work to do, let’s put it that way.

I do love one-upmanship sometimes, like when you see kids breakdancing and who can do the best tricks. It’s common, it’s in our nature as animals, like the birds of paradise who’ve got the best feathers and that sort of stuff. But it’s fun when it’s impulsive and it’s about fun.

I am one of the most idiosyncratic people around.

Football is a fertility festival. Eleven sperm trying to get into the egg. I feel sorry for the goalkeeper.

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’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.

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.

Since I was a kid, I always wanted to figure out how to make a bass line that was a pendulum – like, gravity would control it, and then you could make it play different notes.

With a small town mentality, you make a decision very early on as to whether you are going to do everything by the book or just go your own way and not care.

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

When I was a punk teenager, I rebelled because lots of people in Iceland think that foreigners are evil and that if you don’t wear woolen hats and eat sheep, you’re betraying your heritage.

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.

Living in a capital in Europe but still surrounded by mountains and ocean, my relationship to music was strongest walking to school and back. I would sing to myself and very quickly started mapping out my melodies to landscapes – at the time I just thought it was very matter of fact, a common thing to do.

I love England. It’s no coincidence it’s the first place I moved to for a more cosmopolitan life, which is the only thing Iceland lacks.

In ’96, I was in a very specific place with my own music – I was only listening to beats. You would come to my house, and I would just play beats all day.

I’m a bit of a nerd, I wouldn’t mind working in a shop selling records, or having a radio show where I could play obscure singles.

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

I’m just like anybody. I have my ups and downs.

In order to actually have a touchscreen in front of me and somehow still be connected to nature, I needed to be able to incorporate natural elements into the song structures. Because that’s always been my song-writing accompaniment: nature.

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.

Nature has always been important to me. It has always been in my music.

Most people in Iceland are blonde and blue-eyed. I was nicknamed ‘China girl’ in school ‘cos they thought I looked Asian.

I bought a laptop in 1999, and it was quite liberating, because I could make a lot of my own decisions.

When I was 20, political music was the uncoolest thing on earth.

I get highs, to be totally honest, in second-hand shops. My hunting instinct, I expect, really kicks in.

If nothing else, I have money.

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

I love being a very personal singer-songwriter, but I also like being a scientist or explorer.

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

Seventy per cent humidity is ideal for vocal cords.

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

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.

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.

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.

It would be flattering to be thought of as someone who celebrated life.

Sometimes when I write lyrics there are images in them, usually on a quite simplistic level, like colors. But most often music comes first and then later I sit down with visual people and we chat about what we want to do. I don’t look at myself as a visual artist. I make music.

Singing is like a celebration of oxygen.

I am a grateful… grapefruit.

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.

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

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

With my projects, I really like the extreme high-tech stuff, but I also like the other end, the acoustic things. So it seems like those meet on an iPad, where you make shapes but the sounds coming out of it are really acoustic.

The good thing about Pro Tools is you can actually hear what you’re working on, so it doesn’t just become this intellectual idea. But Pro Tools can be dangerous, too. It can make things sterile.

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.