Top 128 Quotes & Sayings by PJ Harvey

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.

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

It's good to feel excited by the environment you're in.

If anything, I hope being an artist opens up more opportunities 'cause I feel there's a lot of things I could do, like musically and stylistic-wise that I can write, but I don't really have an avenue to show it 'cause most of the things I'm writing are in Hip Hop.

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

Never settle for anything less than you want.

It's so interesting to me how songs take on a shape and body of their own and grow.

People have this idea of me being some kind of monster, and that's the complete opposite of who I am.

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'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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I try to see as much dance, theatre and films as I can because all of it feeds me in a way that I need feeding for what I do.

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

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

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

I feel like I'm being put inside a box, and I'm not necessarily getting a chance. Like I'm not getting the shot that I deserve. So that's what Rare is about 'cause I feel because I am the way that I am, and I don't necessarily fit the mold of a lot of different artists that's out, it's like I'm not getting the chance to show what I can do. So, that's basically all the frustration of that, and everything is pretty much Rare for me anyway.

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

I'm always trying to swim to new ground.

If you want to be good at anything, you have to work hard at it. It doesn't just fall from the sky. I work every day at trying to improve my writing, and I really enjoy it. Nothing fascinates me more than putting words together, and seeing how a collection of words can produce quite a profound effect.

I feel like the actual, the most beautiful thing about a song is that it is something that goes out there in the universe and people use it in the way that they need it in their lives.

Fly with me, touch the face of the true God. And then cry with joy at the depth of my love.

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.

The way I make music is unique to myself and the way I have lived my life - no one else would tell that story in the same way that I do.

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.

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. I've always been very affected by politics, society, but I never got to a place as a writer where I felt like I could begin to deal with such things and do it well.

I think it does surprise me a bit when people have a very fixed idea of what I'm like, based upon the work that I do, which is something that is very separate.

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.

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

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 don't like things to be handed to me on a plate; that means nothing. I like to go through layers of unraveling and every time I listen to something, it makes me feel something different. Now I'm aware of the conflict that's going on, but at the time I just let what was happening happen.

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.

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.

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.

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

Being a recording artist and having thousands of people listening to your music and singing your songs, and paying for it? It feels great!

You can sing a very aggressive word in such a way that it's very funny. You can change words, completely turn them around on their head so that they mean exactly the opposite of what they are written down. There are endless possibilities which I think Diamanda Galás is doing already. She turns everything upside down by the way she sings it. She makes you feel nauseous or horrified or ridiculous just by her voice. I think that's an incredible power.

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

Shame is the shadow of love.

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

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 long ago learned that you can't expect people to interpret the songs in the way they had meant for you, as the writer.

Any of these contemporary war situations, whether civilian or soldier on either side - that's what I was interested in. The people who are being affected. Not so much the political speak at the top of the food chain, but the people who are affected by it on the ground.

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.

People want to build musicians into mythical beings.

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.

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.

I feel like it's very important that I'm doing what I'm doing, and I want to keep honoring that and try and do it as honestly as I can.

Folk music was to strengthen and unify people, whether it was through an uprising and rebellion or whether is was through hard work, bringing in crops. But it was to strengthen each other and that's still what music is about today.

I enjoy looking like a tart and thinking like a politician.

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

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

I find it hard myself to feel justified to sing in a very politically direct way about war or social conditions because I feel so ignorant of a lot of it.

In the past members of my family on both my mother's and father's side have fought in the war, in the first and second World Wars. Unfortunately, they're dead and I wasn't able to speak to them, but that was in our family history too.