P. J. Harvey Quotes

Making music is an emotional thing. And when you're on a video shoot with 50 people there, you have to somehow, in a non-emotional way, say what you want and not feel guilty for it. And that takes growing up and that takes... not caring how people perceive you as much. And it just takes experience, I think.

There's a sadness to all kinds of music if you want to hear it. There's also happiness to it if you want to hear it.

I gave up language for a while, and I started painting.And then I only listened to Miles Davis and other instrumental music to see how it felt to be without words.

Think of anger as a muscle. The way you express anger isn't the way that I do, or you. If you have a good director, you will find that he's getting you to use an entirely different muscle that you never even knew you had - it's real hard and sore, then after a while it becomes normal. And you discover all these new muscles when you enter a new character - that's what a director does for you.

I want to draw and study a few things closely by feeling, not thinking.

I want to go and write music that announces to you that you can feel something. I don’t want to tell you what to feel, but I just want you to have the possibility of feeling something.

I don't cry in real life. I'm just pretty light and I don't get too heavy.

Words are such a poor medium when you really want someone to feel something.

As a director, you have to go in with a really, really, really clear picture of what you want. That's the point of my commentaries. It's so difficult because you're the harshest critic.

Your director is your everything and you devote yourself to them and you want to help create their vision.

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

But music, don't you know, is a dream from which the veils have been lifted. It's not even the expression of a feeling, it's the feeling itself.

Music is the most abstract of the arts and also the most physical....music is under two signs, the stars and the wine

The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human.

Over my real sorrows I never weep.

I personally don't think of the music as being particularly dark, though many seem to disagree as I often have to answer that question. I try and make the Lustmord sound have a real mass and a tangible presence, which some choose to interpret as dark. It's an interesting distinction. Although there are dark elements interwoven within the whole, it's only one of many textures.

Music is the art of all the invisible things that are real. Art, emotion, spiritual essence, consciousness - these things are hard to prove. Music helps you to focus on your sound. We understand that for very young kids.

The composer Stravinsky had written a new piece with a difficult violin passage. After it had been in rehearsal for several weeks, the solo violinist came to Stravinsky and said he was sorry, he had tried his best, the passage was too difficult, no violinist could play it. Stravinsky said, 'I understand that. What I am after is the sound of someone trying to play it.'

My philosophy for producing a record is for everyone involved, including myself, to get out of the way of the song, and at the same time, listen to it as closely as you can, and listen to where the song wants to go.

When I write something, I want the best director to direct it. And that's not going to be me.

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.

The music takes over the words and makes them speak to me in another language.

Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand.

I want to do more drama. Comedy is the path of least resistance for my company. People know we can do them. People know they get a good response. People want to make them. Who am I to push up against that?

You know I want to be a director, but you could never truly see the movies in my head and that, Ed, is why we broke up.