P. J. Harvey Quotes

I was writing poetry, and the Mountain Goats was an outgrowth of that.

I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

The songs sort of come out spontaneously and it'll take me awhile to figure out what exactly is happening lyrically, what kind of story I'm telling. Then I start building little bridges - word bridges - to make everything go from one point to the next point to the next point until it reaches the end.

I'm without a doubt a producer first. The lyrics happen towards the tail-end of the process, mainly because they're more stream-of-consciousness. It's very rare that I'm going to tell a really concrete story.

I started to write my own stories, like small novels, and those novels became poems, and after poems, they became lyrics, and song came from that.

Writing dialogue is like writing a song, which I've done.

You don't have to be as good a writer to write a song; it's a very different process to writing straight prose. To learn how to write prose takes a lot of years of practice.

Sometimes I have songs born out of stories.

Though The Kite Runner was my first completed novel, I had been writing on and off for most of my life, primarily short stories, and primarily for myself.

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

I don't like the word "happy." I wouldn't want to use it that context. I enjoy writing songs, it's a really good challenge, it tickles me. It's a wonderful way to engage with your surroundings, through poetry and songs.

I'm always writing something. There's always some structure sitting around someplace. There's always things on the computer, things scratched on score paper, legal tablets full of lyrics. It's never not buzzing around me all the time. I'm always doing it.

What you compose with is neither here nor there, you compose with words, or you compose with stone plants and trees, or you compose with events; the Sheriff's officer, or whatever.

People say all kinds of things about the ingredients of songs. But you know they are a kind of magic, in the sense that they may easily include a stain on your bedroom wall... and a variety of mis-recollections. And then you name it after a girl's name that you just made up.

I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.

Usually when I write a song, I'll write the music and then kind of fit some words to it.

I am a writer of fragments.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn't that spectacular.

I'd say almost that words come first, melody second.

I think, with music, I'm a lyricist who talks about real life things.

You work very hard on the lyrics. Getting them to fit the contours of improvised melodies.

I wrote them kind of consecutively, starting with 'Holy,' and then '1950,' 'Talia,' 'Upper West Side,' 'Make My Bed,' and I was kind of like, 'This is it.' It felt right. It felt complete. It felt like a sentence. I really enjoyed making it.

As a songwriter, metaphor is instinctual.

As a songwriter, I've always loved to tell stories. But in my band, it was always about what would make sense for a band to put out.