PJ Harvey Quotes

I'm finding that writing poetry is strengthening my songwriting, because you're learning to make a piece of writing work on a page with nothing else. I was also finding within poetry I felt a lot more free to write about very different matters, to write about social issues or things that are going on around me.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I think Ive got a pretty good sense of humor.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Shame is the shadow of love.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

I'm always trying to swim to new ground.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.