Quotes By P. J. Harvey

I was a visual artist primarily and a writer, even from a very young age. I wrote a lot of stories and poetry and... I had a desire to create always. And I always had a desire to show my work.

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.

My mother and father are very involved with music. It's completely part of their soul.

I'm not a writer where I feel particularly blessed by great inspiration every day. I don't. I have to work really hard at it to try and say the things I'm concerned with.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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 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.

Making me into a role model is placing too much importance on what I see as a work in progress.

My mom is a sculptress.

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.

There is nothing more boring than doing singing exercises.

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. I didn't want the set to be boring. So I'd moved some older songs onto the autoharp, and they worked really well.

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