P.J. Harvey Quotes

My mother and father are very involved with music. It's completely part of their soul. They have an incredible record collection, all vinyl, of some of the best artists, in my eyes, that you can come across.

I did photography, painting, and drawing, but I prefer sculpture. I like it because it's very physical.

Hey! I'm the king o' the world!
You hear my song?
Come on, measure me –
I'm twenty inches long!

I literally left school and went straight into music via art college for a year, and I've been so involved in my job of writing songs that the more actively involved part became channeled into standing on the stage and saying things that way.

Tell you my name
F.U.C.K!
50 ft Queenie!
Force 10 hurricane.
Biggest woman,
I could have 10 sons!
10 gods, 10 queens,
10 ft and rising!

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.

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

In order to make my solo shows as interesting as possible, I moved songs onto very different instruments so that I was moving instruments quite a lot during the set.

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.

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.

There's so much you can do with laying words on a bed of music. You can completely change their meaning with the type of music or the way they're sung.

With songs I almost see the images, see the action, and then all I have to do is describe it. It's almost like watching a scene from a film, and that's what I go about trying to catch in a song.

I think that's always very valuable: to keep the mind open to receiving all sorts of information, which can then be used in my work, but also just as a human being.

My father is actually a quarry man - he deals in stone. He also at one point had a lot of sheep, he owned a sheep farm, but primarily the family business was in stone.

I didn't know folk music growing up, no. It's something I've come to study, really, because I think there's so much to learn from traditional music in the sense of the way music began as a way of communication, the traveling storyteller, the bard, the minstrels.

I think the way we are as we get older is a result of what we knew when we were children.

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

Well, I don't really concern myself too much with what other people make of my work.

I'm not an autobiographical writer, but I am a writer who deals with human emotion on all levels.

Filthy tight, the dress is filthy
I'm falling flat and my arms are empty
Clear the way, better get it out of this room
A fallen woman in dancing costume

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

I think I'm a songwriter. I grab an instrument to make my body a song, but I'm not a player as such, maybe a little more on guitar, but certainly not piano.

People like Howlin' Wolf, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, John Lee Hooker, Nina Simone, Captain Beefheart - all of these artists were what I grew up listening to every day of my life. And there's a very healthy music scene in the west country of England, where I grew up.

I decide immediately if I like a person and if I do, then I'm myself, and if I don't, then I give nothing.

There's also a level of discipline I use as a writer, designed to get better at what I'm doing, that requires quite a lot of study and quite a lot of hard work as well.

I come from an art-school background, and I still feel that in my music, it's about exploration and challenging myself, about putting myself in a place that's frightening because I haven't been there before.