Björk at the 2001 Academy Awards, wearing her swan dress

Björk Guðmundsdóttir (born 21 November 1965), Icelandic singer and actress.

Quotes

Songs

  • 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 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
  • His wicked sense of humour suggests exciting sex
    His fingers focus on her
    Her touches
    He's Venus as a Boy!
  • I'm back at my cliff
    still throwing things off
    I listen to the sounds they make
    on their way down
    I follow with my eyes 'til they crash
    imagine what my body would sound like slamming against those rocks
    and when it lands
    will my eyes
    be closed or open?
  • If travel is searching
    And home what's been found
    I'm not stopping

    I'm going hunting
    I'm the hunter
    I'll bring back the goods
    But I don't know when
  • I thought I could organize freedom
    How Scandinavian of me
  • I want to go, on a mountain top!
    With a radio and good batteries
    And play a joyous tune
    And free the
    human
    race
    from suffering (saccharine)
  • Emotional landscapes
    They puzzle me
    The riddle gets solved and you push me up to this state of emergency
    How beautiful to be!
    State of emergency
    Is where I want to be
    • "Jóga", from Homogenic (1997)
  • I dare you to take me on
    I dare you to show me your palms
    I'm so bored of cowards who say they want (love)
    Then they can't handle love
    • "5 Years", from Homogenic (1997)
  • He offers a handshake, crooked five fingers
    They form a pattern yet to be matched
    On the surface simplicity
    But the darkest pit in me is pagan poetry
  • "When in doubt, give."
    • "Pleasure is All Mine", from "Medúlla" (2004).
  • You have done
    Good for yourselves
    Since you left my wet embrace
    And crawled ashore
    . . .
    My sons and my daughters
    Ho-oh!
    Your sweat is salty
    I am why
  • Declare independence
    Don't let them do that to you

    Start your own currency
    Make your own stamp
    Protect your language

Other quotes

  • "I am grateful... grapefruit."
    • At the Brit Awards 1998
  • "Everyone is bisexual’: “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.”
    • Diva magazine, October 2004
  • "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."
    • From Newsweek, September 6 2004 issue, defending a song claimed to be "really hard to listen to" ("Ancestors") from her album Medúlla
  • "It's interesting for me to bring up a girl. You go to the toy store and the female characters there — Cinderella, the lady in Beauty and the Beast — their major task is to find Prince Charming. And I'm like, wait a minute — it's 2005! We've fought so hard to have a say, and not just live through our partners, and yet you're still seeing two-year-old girls with this message pushed at them that the only important thing is to find this amazing dress so that the guy will want you. It's something my mum pointed out to me when I was little — so much that I almost threw up — but she's right."
    • From The Observer, March 13 2005 issue, asserting for the first time the appeal to her of feminist ideology
  • "It's a big question. Getting rid of religion would be a good start, wouldn't it? It seems to be causing a lot of havoc."
    • When asked "Given the chance, how would you change the world?" (Independent, 18 March 2005.)
  • "I was talking to a friend about it recently and I told him that the thing about making that film that upset me most was how cruel Lars is to the woman he is working with. Not that I can't take it, because I'm pretty tough and completely capable of defending myself, but because my ideals of the ultimate creator were shattered. And my friend said "What did you expect? All major directors are "sexist", a maker is not necessarily an expert in human rights or female/male equality!
    My answer was that you can take quite sexist film directors like Woody Allen or Stanley Kubrick and still they are the one that provide the soul to their movies. In Lars von Trier's case it is not so and he knows it. He needs a female to provide his work soul. And he envies them and hates them for it. So he has to destroy them during the filming. And hide the evidence. What saves him as an artist, though, is that he is so painfully honest that even though he will manage to cover up his crime in the "real" world (he is a genius to set things up that everybody thinks it is just his female-actress-at-the-moment imagination, that she is just hysterical or pre-menstrual), his films become a documentation of this "soul-robbery". Breaking the Waves is the clearest example of that.
    bjork."
  • "You know, it's ironic that just at the point the lawyers and the businessmen had calculated how to control music, the internet comes along and fucks everything up." Björk gives the finger again, this time waving it into the air. "God bless the internet," she adds. And what about you, then? "I'll still be there, waving a pirate flag."

About her

  • "Do not fuck with Björk! Björk will beat your ass! … I saw Björk beat this woman's ass one time in this videotape. She was in the Bangkok airport and she was pushing her luggage cart and this woman came up and just touched her and Björk went (roaring and hissing). And it was so scary, because you didn't expect it at all, because Björk is so cute. … And Björk called the woman she attacked afterwards to apologize. 'I'm very sorry I tried to pull your eyes up over your head. Somebody must have fed me after midnight.' But Björk wore the best dress ever to the Oscars, ever. She wore a swan. And I'm not talking about a dress with white feathers on it. Oh, no. She rocked the whole bird. The beak was up here and shit. And she accessorized it with an egg -- what else you gon' wear with your bird?! And all of the fashion magazines said she was the worst dressed, but when they say you're the worst, that means you're the best."
    • Margaret Cho, Assassin
  • "I think I just kind of thought about all the artists that I really respected throughout the - just any genre of music really and I think everybody that I respected and liked. They were just them. You know, they're people who always stuck to who they were, and were true and honest about who they were. So I think that kind of gave me a real like confidence to just stick at it. Just thinking about people like Bjork - you know, I don't know, Bob Dylan, you know artists that truly were strong in themselves."
  • She has a weird energy about her as a woman. We were in this town to do a show and she spread such positive vibes. There were birds singing and rainbows – we could even see a tornado going on! We could actually see it!” Maya exclaims. “I think that every artist has an aura and persona that develops and Bjork spreads such a positive energy. You can just feel it.” She recounts the part of the show where the Icelandic princess allowed her to get involved in the finale, clearly ecstatic at the trust the legendary songstress placed in her to play her instruments. “Now I wouldn’t even let myself play instruments!” she laughs. “But it was so good that she wasn’t afraid of me messing her show up. I suppose its something that you learn when you get older.”
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