PJ Harvey Quotes

Maybe I'm just purely lucky. If I've come up against obstacles I've always found another way around it.

I feel like "Not For Long" was one for me just because I got to work with two people that I looked up to...

When I was young, I had idols that I thought were wonderful. I wanted to be just like them.

I feel like I make a soundtrack for the come up, and I feel like there's so many people that's trying to figure out how to chase their dreams, or that are in the process of chasing their dreams, so they connect with that. And then being a singer, you don't really get to touch on nothing either.

I knew what I didn't want to do- that's always my starting point. The starting point is always that I don't want to repeat myself. Or I try my best not to, with varying degrees of success.

I've so much left to explore, it's enormously exciting to me. It's a passion. I just try and get better at what I do, and I study it very hard, like it is my life degree.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs.

There is nothing more boring than doing singing exercises.

I've always been very interested in the visual aspect of what I do.

Writing is something that I practice at every day to get better at.

I tried to use words that were dealing with the emotional quality that any human being could recognize in the way that they felt about their country. It's to do with the world we live in. That world is a brutal one and full of war. It's also full of many wonderful things and love and hope

Some people, like Leonard Cohen, write one album every 10 years, and labor over a song for five years at a time.

I think of myself as a songwriter, a weaver of story and imagination in a way that a novelist might write a book.

I always wanted to be an artist. I think I was just waiting on somebody to approve me and be like, "Oh, okay, you should be an artist," you know 'cause it wasn't until I stopped looking for approval that I could actually do it.

You shouldn't separate the piece from the way it's intended. I always feel like words shouldn't be unraveled from the music. They're all linked so much together.

I think I just speak on what the regular people are going through outside of love 'cause, of course, there's always gonna be a love song, but there's so many other parts of life... being lost, feeling your way around, what you gonna do next.

I long ago learned that you can't expect people to interpret the songs in the way they had meant for you, as the writer.

Some things lend themselves well to songs, some things don't, and I'm learning that a lot at the moment. It's still a relatively new way of writing. It's only really the last five to 10 years that I've taken my writing seriously in this way, as something I can keep working toward. I think I feel myself much more before as simply a songwriter.

I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing, and I don't ever feel like I'm working in a cycle in that respect, because it's every day anyway, no matter what I'm doing. Then I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems, or sometimes not.

I've always felt profoundly about what's going on in the world on a daily basis. What I hadn't felt was that I was at a point in my writing career where I could write about these things in songs and do it well.

It's so much in me to want to keep experimenting all the time. It's just inherent. Therefore I keep reaching for instruments I don't particularly know how to play, and then I become excited. That gives me energy to want to make new things, and it forces me to hear things in new ways, which then can only help to say things in a new way.

I see men come and go, but there'll be one who'll collect my soul.

I was working with D'Mile - he's amazing! And I don't know, it was like that guitar riff was so crazy to me, and so I think I was frustrated about something that happened earlier and I feel like I'm just a good guy, I don't cut people off, I don't really call people out when they do stuff that they should be called out on, and I'm just always the one being the bigger person. So, that day "Gangster" just came out. That's just how I feel in that day to day life.

When a poem might become a song, then certain parts are repeated and might become a refrain or a chorus, so they change in that way. But it's more the nature of the words and what they're saying that determines whether it's a poem or a song.

There is a thread connecting you no matter how far away you are from someone and you know I have two or three relationships in my life that are like that.

You know if I see a work that really I am very affected by and inspired by then it makes me want to try things with my work that maybe I hadn't considered trying before and I think that is the biggest complement that you can pay somebody.

I don't like things to be handed to me on a plate; that means nothing. I like to go through layers of unraveling and every time I listen to something, it makes me feel something different. Now I'm aware of the conflict that's going on, but at the time I just let what was happening happen.

I've always been very politically interested from a very young age and I hadn't felt that was something I could begin to bring into my songwriting because I hadn't felt I'd reached the stage, that I had the skill with language enough, yet, to do that.

People want to build musicians into mythical beings.

I try to see as much dance, theatre and films as I can because all of it feeds me in a way that I need feeding for what I do.

Shame is the shadow of love.

People have a tendency to see country life through rose-colored glasses.

The devil wanders into my soul.

I think you have to be very careful getting the balance right if you're going to talk about grand themes like war, death and nationhood. You need to use the right language or don't do it at all.

Maybe you're a singer or not, but what taps into the soul leads to the heart, and that's really what I came away with, with the starting point for the record being that I could speak as a human being and feel things very deeply.

I firmly disbelieve that one has to be a tortured soul to write good music.

I enjoy looking like a tart and thinking like a politician.

I was really influenced by a lot of Disney soundtracks, because that's what I used to watch all the time, and they always put music in it, which is why I tend to have popular melodies over harder beats.

I do take enormous interest in what's going on. I try to see whatever I can, whenever I can.

Before I record for real, I know pretty much exactly how I want them to feel.

I've always felt that I'm affected by the world, by the way we treat each other, by the way different countries treat each other. I've always been very affected by politics, society, but I never got to a place as a writer where I felt like I could begin to deal with such things and do it well.

Most of the stuff that I do talk about, about being counted out and being an underdog, 'cause that's what I feel like I am.

I really don't pay too much attention; I don't go out of my way to read any interviews.

In college, I thought I wanted to be solely an artist, and then when I got here, to college, I was like, "Okay, well I want to be a songwriter," 'cause it was like close to Nashville.

Folk music was to strengthen and unify people, whether it was through an uprising and rebellion or whether is was through hard work, bringing in crops. But it was to strengthen each other and that's still what music is about today.

But huge photographs of dead bodies are slightly different. I couldn't find much humor there.

I'd want to read the stories that I'd written, I'd want to show the drawings that I made. That was just purely natural. So I knew I wanted to go into the arts in some way and that I'd want to show that work in some way.

I don't think that much anymore in terms of 'write a record, record a record, tour a record,' because in my own mind, things have changed, in that I'm just an ongoing artist. I'm not quite sure what the next project needs to be until it presents himself, and then I know. I just follow dutifully while I'm being led.