PJ Harvey Quotes

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

PJ Harvey

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

PJ Harvey

#3. 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.

PJ Harvey

#4. Everything from a lifetime's worth of collecting things. You know as we go through life, and something stays and ends up on your shelf and lives there until you die? Just those little things.

PJ Harvey

#5. I would never feel confident enough to express my views and opinions as the right ones because I just don't think that's possible. There are so many sides to everything that nobody is right or wrong.

PJ Harvey

#6. And all of these writers offer me a greater understanding of what it is to be alive, and that is such an incredible thing art can do for other people. It made me want to try and get close to this strange, mysterious thing that people can do with words.

PJ Harvey

#7. Well, I'm quite a self-deprecating person.

PJ Harvey

#8. The craft, the writing of a song, is about creating a story, a life story, a world within three minutes, but that's the frame, if you like, the picture frame. That fascinates me.

PJ Harvey

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

PJ Harvey

#10. 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.

PJ Harvey

#11. 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.

PJ Harvey

#12. 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.

PJ Harvey

#13. What we are fed through the media I do not accept, unless you see it with your own eyes you cant trust anything.

PJ Harvey

#14. 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.

PJ Harvey

#15. I think a lot of people have an idealistic view - if you grow up in the country, there can't possibly be anything wrong with you.

PJ Harvey

#16. Fly with me, touch the face of the true God. And then cry with joy at the depth of my love.

PJ Harvey

#17. Obviously, the emotions I want to convey through music are streamed through the way I interpret life.

PJ Harvey

#18. First off, I think nudity is taken differently in America, though they did make a fuss in England, too.

PJ Harvey

#19. I just love having no clothes on outside, and the only time to do that is when the sun's shining. It's a wonderful sensation to not have any clothes on.

PJ Harvey

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

PJ Harvey

#21. Ideas for songs can come from something as simple as a photograph and letting my imagination run wild on an old photograph that I found, or to a film that I have seen or to just most of the time, just daily walking through life and keeping your eyes open.

PJ Harvey

#22. I think Ive got a pretty good sense of humor.

PJ Harvey

#23. I'm doing quite a lot of painting on stones - little funny fish and animals.

PJ Harvey

#24. I studied art just short of the level where you can earn a degree.

PJ Harvey

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

PJ Harvey

#26. I've been so used to being supported by musicians, and I don't class myself as a particularly adept musician on instruments. I think I'm a songwriter.

PJ Harvey

#27. The devil wanders into my soul.

PJ Harvey

#28. But even when I do give interviews, I always come across as such a completely different person. It seems like there's no controlling it anyway.

PJ Harvey

#29. People want to build musicians into mythical beings.

PJ Harvey

#30. It varies, I don't think there is any one set way of writing songs or coming up with ideas, it comes in so many ways you know.

PJ Harvey

#31. I think I'm a maker of songs, and songs are like films or a picture: You put them over there, and they have nothing to do with you.

PJ Harvey

#32. In the same way, I write some of my more difficult pieces when I'm at very happy stages in my life.

PJ Harvey

#33. I find it hard myself to feel justified to sing in a very politically direct way about war or social conditions because I feel so ignorant of a lot of it.

PJ Harvey

#34. 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.

PJ Harvey

#35. I would listen most particularly to the countries whose language I didn't understand, didn't know what they were singing. But being a singer myself, I could understand because of the emotion.

PJ Harvey

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

PJ Harvey

#37. When I write - I always write on my own - I demo those songs on a four-track.

PJ Harvey

#38. I do write a lot of prose. It's not disciplined enough yet that it's actually become stories, or short stories. The idea of writing a novel seems impossible.

PJ Harvey

#39. My town was even smaller. Only six hundred people. We didn't have a grocery store.

PJ Harvey

#40. If you come at the record feeling really happy and optimistic, it can be incredibly beautiful and uplifting, and if you come at it in a bleak moment, it can feel like a very dark place to share. It's all down to the listener.

PJ Harvey

#41. We just kind of lost our way. But we were looking to be free. One day we'll float. Take life as it comes.

PJ Harvey

#42. You know, two people can say exactly the same words, saying the same story, and it would mean something entirely different.

PJ Harvey

#43. To think of myself as a role model is extremely flattering, but I could never accept that, because Im just learning like everybody else.

PJ Harvey

#44. I feel like it's very important that I'm doing what I'm doing, and I want to keep honoring that and try and do it as honestly as I can.

PJ Harvey

#45. Being a recording artist and having thousands of people listening to your music and singing your songs, and paying for it? It feels great!

PJ Harvey

#46. 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.

PJ Harvey

#47. Love for money is my sin, any man calls, I'll let him in.

PJ Harvey

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

PJ Harvey

#49. Shame is the shadow of love.

PJ Harvey

#50. I don't hold onto anything, because it's a waste of energy to do so, really. There's nothing that I can do about the way people want to write about me. I just try and concentrate on my work and do that as well as I can.

PJ Harvey

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

PJ Harvey

#52. Yeah, I mean I am somebody that makes an effort to go and see a lot of exhibitions, painting, drawing, sculpture.

PJ Harvey

#53. 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.

PJ Harvey

#54. I have learnt through doing interviews throughout my life that the way that somebody can write about something can change entirely how it was meant, or what actually happened.

PJ Harvey

#55. I am someone that follows the news and reads newspapers yet what do you believe and what don't you.

PJ Harvey

#56. I'm always writing, the past 10 years. A lot has changed, in that it's something I do every day.

PJ Harvey

#57. It's so interesting to me how songs take on a shape and body of their own and grow.

PJ Harvey

#58. I make tiny wooden people with bits of hair. Puppets and things like that.

PJ Harvey

#59. I think blues music is music of the soul. Of course, there are other forms. You could call some classical music blues music in that way.

PJ Harvey

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

PJ Harvey

#61. Ever since time began: What song is not about love? Whether it's about love from man to woman or parent to child, or grandmother to granddaughter ... It just goes on and on. Or whether it's the love of one's country.

PJ Harvey

#62. I'm finding my way, and I make mistakes.

PJ Harvey

#63. I'm always trying to swim to new ground.

PJ Harvey

#64. The way I make music is unique to myself and the way I have lived my life - no one else would tell that story in the same way that I do.

PJ Harvey

#65. I think that most art is asking a question or is looking for something, looking for answers and that is what life seems to be about for most people.

PJ Harvey

#66. 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.

PJ Harvey