Top 90 PJ Harvey Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Yeah, I mean I am somebody that makes an effort to go and see a lot of exhibitions, painting, drawing, sculpture.”

— PJ Harvey

52. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

53. “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

54. “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

55. “I think of myself as a songwriter, a weaver of story and imagination in a way that a novelist might write a book.”

— PJ Harvey

56. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

57. “I’m always trying to swim to new ground.”

— PJ Harvey

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

— PJ Harvey

59. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

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

— PJ Harvey

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

— PJ Harvey

62. “It’s so much in me to want to keep experimenting all the time. It’s just inherent.”

— PJ Harvey

63. “I’m doing quite a lot of painting on stones – little funny fish and animals.”

— PJ Harvey

64. “Well, I don’t really concern myself too much with what other people make of my work.”

— PJ Harvey

65. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

66. “People want to build musicians into mythical beings.”

— PJ Harvey

67. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

68. “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

69. “It’s so interesting to me how songs take on a shape and body of their own and grow.”

— PJ Harvey

70. “Ideas for songs can come from something as simple as a photograph and letting my imagination run wild on an old photograph that I found, or to a film that I have seen or to just most of the time, just daily walking through life and keeping your eyes open.”

— PJ Harvey

71. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

72. “Maybe I’m just purely lucky. If I’ve come up against obstacles I’ve always found another way around it.”

— PJ Harvey

73. “When I was young, I had idols that I thought were wonderful. I wanted to be just like them.”

— PJ Harvey

74. “In the same way, I write some of my more difficult pieces when I’m at very happy stages in my life.”

— PJ Harvey

75. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

76. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

77. “I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs.”

— PJ Harvey

78. “I am someone that follows the news and reads newspapers yet what do you believe and what don’t you.”

— PJ Harvey

79. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

80. “When I write – I always write on my own – I demo those songs on a four-track.”

— PJ Harvey

81. “I’m not an autobiographical writer, but I am a writer who deals with human emotion on all levels.”

— PJ Harvey

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

— PJ Harvey

83. “But even when I do give interviews, I always come across as such a completely different person. It seems like there’s no controlling it anyway.”

— PJ Harvey

84. “I’ve always felt profoundly about what’s going on in the world on a daily basis. What I hadn’t felt was that I was at a point in my writing career where I could write about these things in songs and do it well.”

— PJ Harvey

85. “I’m always writing, the past 10 years. A lot has changed, in that it’s something I do every day.”

— PJ Harvey

86. “The devil wanders into my soul.”

— PJ Harvey

87. “Before I record for real, I know pretty much exactly how I want them to feel.”

— PJ Harvey

88. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

89. “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

90. “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.”

— PJ Harvey

91. “I would listen most particularly to the countries whose language I didn’t understand, didn’t know what they were singing. But being a singer myself, I could understand because of the emotion.”

— PJ Harvey

92. “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

93. “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

94. “I’ve been so used to being supported by musicians, and I don’t class myself as a particularly adept musician on instruments. I think I’m a songwriter.”

— PJ Harvey

95. “Maybe you’re a singer or not, but what taps into the soul leads to the heart, and that’s really what I came away with, with the starting point for the record being that I could speak as a human being and feel things very deeply.”

— PJ Harvey