PJ Harvey Quotes

If you were going to make sculptures of them, the swivel poems would be disparate objects all attached with hinges and the prose poems would be small sheep wrapped in extra wool.

I also like poems that are haunted by a structure or a narrative, or poems that frisk flirtatiously at the boundary of sense.

I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems.

People "confess" can be wildly different. I might go into the confessional and say, "Father, what is my obsession with miniatures?"

I would love to collaborate on a graphic novel with an artist - I'm terrible at drawing but I really love that genre.

I am pretty interested in hybrid forms. I love graphic novels and I think there should be more graphic poems in the world.

Having my poems set to music by Eric Moe has completely knocked my socks off.

We hail science as man's truest friend and noblest helper.

In solitude all great things are born.

Life is the offspring of death.

I'm always trying to swim to new ground.

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

I feel that my dreamscapes are part of my everyday life, and sometimes I can't tell the difference.

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 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.

If I ever meet a writer or a painter, I don't presuppose that they are like the work they are presenting.

The artists that I love- whether painters or filmmakers- it's because something resonates in me because I've felt it.

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.

I'm a visual artist myself and always have been so it's very natural for me to be very concerned with presentation, whether it's artwork or onstage.

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

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.

You go back and look at some of the ancient writings that exist throughout the world about wars and it's the same; the human beings' articulation of events is the same. That really fascinated me.

People want to build musicians into mythical beings.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

Like I have to pretend like I'm a male rapper, that I got stacks and we're in the club, and what do I want to say. And then, when writing Rare I could just be PJ.

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.

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

I like to be around things that I find inspiring.

I like things that are beaten up, that have lived a little. I like things that are real. I like things that are made out of wood or string. I never feel very responsive to plastic machinery.

I also like a lot of silence, and when you're touring, it's constantly noise, all the time, you're surrounded with 15 or 20 people the entire time. I find that tough.

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 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 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.

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.

It's so much in me to want to keep experimenting all the time. It's just inherent.

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

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

The devil wanders into my 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.

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

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.

[Writing] has helped me meet people.

What Rare [albom] allows me to do is gonna show people other things that I'm capable of 'cause they really haven't heard a lot of things outside of the rap stuff that I do.

I never feel that I have to adopt a character. It's more the way I choose to present the music and that's always based on what is right for the song.

It [ "Not For Long"] was the biggest song that I've had, and I actually heard it on the radio multiple times.