PJ Harvey quotes

PJ Harvey is an English singer-songwriter, musician, and composer known for her innovative approach to alternative rock and raw, emotive lyrics. Her work blends various genres and has earned her critical acclaim and multiple awards. She continues to inspire audiences worldwide with her distinctive voice and artistic vision. Here are 31 of her quotes:

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.

PJ Harvey

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.

PJ Harvey

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

PJ Harvey

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.

PJ Harvey

I'm probably much more influenced by film-makers and painters than I am by other songwriters or poets.

PJ Harvey

I don't loathe interviews, I'm just one of those people who makes music because I find it difficult to talk.

PJ Harvey

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.

PJ Harvey

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.

PJ Harvey

There is nothing more boring than doing singing exercises.

PJ Harvey

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

PJ Harvey

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.

PJ Harvey

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.

PJ Harvey

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.

PJ Harvey

I've always been very visceral in that I feel things very deeply.

PJ Harvey

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.

PJ Harvey

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

PJ Harvey

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

PJ Harvey

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.

PJ Harvey

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.

PJ Harvey

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.

PJ Harvey

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.

PJ Harvey

As I grew older, I actually was prepared to go into fine arts school and do a degree. That was what I was actually settled upon when I was offered a record deal.

PJ Harvey