Top 90 PJ Harvey Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I enjoy looking like a tart and thinking like a politician.”

— PJ Harvey

2. “Shame is the shadow of love.”

— PJ Harvey

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

— PJ Harvey

4. “I do take enormous interest in what’s going on. I try to see whatever I can, whenever I can.”

— PJ Harvey

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

— PJ Harvey

6. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

7. “I think Ive got a pretty good sense of humor.”

— PJ Harvey

8. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

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

— PJ Harvey

10. “Love for money is my sin, any man calls, I’ll let him in.”

— PJ Harvey

11. “I’m finding my way, and I make mistakes.”

— PJ Harvey

12. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

13. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

14. “I come from an art-school background, and I still feel that in my music, it’s about exploration and challenging myself, about putting myself in a place that’s frightening because I haven’t been there before.”

— PJ Harvey

15. “Well, I’m quite a self-deprecating person.”

— PJ Harvey

16. “Ive always been very visceral in that I feel things very deeply.”

— PJ Harvey

17. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

18. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

19. “I did photography, painting, and drawing, but I prefer sculpture. I like it because it’s very physical.”

— PJ Harvey

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

— PJ Harvey

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

— PJ Harvey

22. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

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

— PJ Harvey

24. “First off, I think nudity is taken differently in America, though they did make a fuss in England, too.”

— PJ Harvey

25. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

26. “But huge photographs of dead bodies are slightly different. I couldn’t find much humor there.”

— PJ Harvey

27. “I really don’t pay too much attention; I don’t go out of my way to read any interviews.”

— PJ Harvey

28. “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

29. “There’s a level of discipline I use as a writer, designed to get better at what I’m doing, that requires quite a lot of study and quite a lot of hard work as well.”

— PJ Harvey

30. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

31. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

32. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

33. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

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

— PJ Harvey

35. “I see men come and go, but there’ll be one who’ll collect my soul.”

— PJ Harvey

36. “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

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

— PJ Harvey

38. “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

39. “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

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

— PJ Harvey

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

— PJ Harvey

42. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

43. “My town was even smaller. Only six hundred people. We didn’t have a grocery store.”

— PJ Harvey

44. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

45. “My mom is a sculptress.”

— PJ Harvey

46. “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

47. “It varies, I don’t think there is any one set way of writing songs or coming up with ideas, it comes in so many ways you know.”

— PJ Harvey

48. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

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

— PJ Harvey

50. “There is nothing more boring than doing singing exercises.”

— PJ Harvey