P. J. Harvey Quotes

The arts have always been in and around my life.

Music is the doorway that has led me to drawing, photography, and writing.

Their films would probably be better if they'd seen a few more films, which runs counter to this idiotic theory that you run the risk of being influenced if you see too much.

I start listening to something, or I'm seeing somebody a lot or seeing their art. And then I just really want to make a picture of them.

I'm a bit of a magpie: whatever I see or hear or read feeds into the songs.

I grew up dancing and singing, and I pool together my life experience and relationships and put it into work.

I love composing and writing music and dancing and performing and conceptualizing creatively for visual mediums. I love to create.

As a filmmaker, I always took my inspiration from a filmmaker named Marcel Ophüls, who said, "I always have a point of view, but the trick is showing how hard it is to come to that point of view."

I have always looked to movies and theatre for inspiration.

I could never have done what I did without being involved with Lindsay Kemp's company.

As far back as I can remember though, I always loved performing.

Both my parents are creative. My dad did act when he was younger, but they're both very creative.

As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught for a time in art colleges the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien.

I tell my workshop students, 'I want you to think of yourselves as artists. Then, when you're writing, you're painting, you're crafting, you're making a design, you're sculpting, you're creating choreography, sound, a sound script.'

You'd have to be completely crazy not to be influenced by and take from other artists. It's completely impossible not to.

You can never tell when an artist really will take up someone's work and work with it happily.

I get to study and I got to mimic and what I basically did was I stole from every person that I could steal from. I was an imitator. That's what I was. It was years before I could take all of these things that I loved about all of these different artists and put them together and find my voice.

All I wanted was to connect my moods with those of Paris. Beauty paints and when it painted most, I shot.

I began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms - painting, photography, music, dance, theater.

I like drawing people in the airport or on the bus or in venues. I like catching people in the moment. It's a similar inspiration for me in terms of songwriting.

I am inspired just by the way a scene can be interpreted by the actors. It can make a huge difference on the type of music that you write. It's best for me if I don't work at all on a project until the movie is shot and I have some sort of edit in front of me.

I am grateful to theatre for making me what I am today. But it's not like theatre is my first love. I am equally attached to cinema, which is, actually, a child of theatre, since it borrows heavily from it.

In my view, the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels, direct films and put on plays tend to read too many novels, watch too many films and go to too many plays.

I don't think I really invented anybody. I have drawn on real life.

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.