Jenny Hval Quotes

Health is so important now, it's ridiculous - the body has become frightening, this thing that will kill you if you don't keep really healthy. The body is the enemy now.

I'm not trying to be a solution or create a freer, utopian world. I think my music dreams of it, though.

I'm constantly reading and trying to enlighten myself to how the world works in its silent ways to make everything seem normal when it's actually incredibly discriminating.

I'm obsessed with voices in film. I have this memory of how people say words, even on the most intensely stupid reality TV show.

I've always seen myself as the person listening to alternative music and all that - generic indie person. I always tried to be the least pretty I could be.

I'm inspired by that rawness in very direct communication. My work is not meant to keep people happy or give them an escape.

I really hated being the Norwegian girl in every single conversation in Australia, so I tried to make my Norwegian-ness invisible, speaking like whoever was around me.

I'm always going back and forth between wanting to do stuff that's abstract and stuff that's just telling everybody to listen.

Norway's a very gender-aware country, and we're very liberal. There are lots of women's voices being heard here compared to many other countries.

I remember being very, very aware of gender when I was really young. Not necessarily in a bad way. Maybe it's a little bit because I'm Norwegian and how I've been brought up.

Everybody needs to read a lot of revolutionary stuff, because the revolution is a big part of our will to live.

I took interest in Paris Hilton at one point and got fascinated with her voice.

I've studied film a lot, so I know much more about film than music, but I don't think I could have made films.

I've always been a fan of reading art catalogues from exhibitions, and plays, and I've worked with a surrealist German playwright, Heiner Müller.

I got really interested in the language used in blogs written by young girls - a young person's aggression, which is always lacking from the visual world.

The body should not just be something you see. It's also the inside of it. It's frightening and abstract and much more than pretty or not pretty. The shape of it is boring.

I've never been good at being nostalgic, and I've never been able to focus on sound without having a voice that's very here-and-now.

On an emotional level, I don't want to be a guide. I want people to hear things and experience them their own way.

Gym is a center of capitalist breakdown, and everything is focused on the individual.

I'm not in any way trying to make statements that are not also invaded by emotions and abstract ideas that I don't really understand myself. It's more interesting when I can do that.

If you believe that you have nothing to fight for, that just means the people in power, and the people with money, can sneak anything into your life. Everything can be taken away from you.

When you're outside of genre, you can expose more vulnerability.

Soft things are terrifying. They're the real signals of death. Images of strength can never be that terrifying. It's the images of weakness that are a real apocalypse.