P. J. Harvey Quotes

I can only write songs when somebody gives me some water to swim in. Otherwise, I'm a fish on the beach.

I'm still learning a lot as a songwriter. I try to write down and make a note of ideas that I cross paths with on a day-to-day basis, whether it be a conversation or something I hear on the radio, seeing a movie, or just thoughts in my head as I'm walking down the street.

When I'm writing [songs], some days the pen just goes. I'm not in charge and I'm almost listening outside of it. That's when I realize that we all have to start looking at life as a gift. It's like listening to a color and believing that these colors have soul mates and once you get them all together the painting is complete.

I see songwriting as having to do with experience, and the more you've experienced, the better it is. But it has to be tempered, and you just must let your imagination run.

If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often. It’s a mysterious condition. It’s much like the life of a Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.

Sometimes it could be just during the day, when I'm riding in the car or on the plane. I'll hear somebody say something that strikes a chord and I write it down and write bars at a time, and then when I'm in the studio I go to those bars and I'm like, "Maybe I should make a song about this."

"Where do you get your ideas?" That's the one question I'm genuinely sick of being asked, and also genuinely fascinated by. What fascinates me is not that people ask the question, but what kind of answer are they really looking for? Because if I tell them the truth, which is "I make them up," they seem very disappointed. They want to know about the trek I do once a year to the mountain.

You ask me where I get my ideas. That I cannot tell you with certainty. They come unsummoned, directly, indirectly - I could seize them with my hands - out in the open air, in the woods, while walking, in the silence of the nights, at dawn, excited by moods which are translated by the poet into words, by me into tones that sound and roar and storm about me till I have set them down in notes.

In the beginning, there was a kind of energy that - like an urgency to express myself, and the songs just couldn't be held in. But I think it changes, the nature of how that - what that energy is. And I need to court the muse in a much more serious way.

You can imagine several scenes from Star Wars? The way they looked? For me, that's how music is. Sometimes I'll be developing riffs for songs, just while I'm sitting around and not playing.

That's what's great about the arts. Everything inspires you, and you get a chance to grow from watching other people and how they do their work.

I consider creativity to be a more non-rational, subconscious thing. You have a relationship to your creativity - you can feed it with content, with some rational prodding and sleep and things like that, but the mechanisms by which your creativity work are largely unknown.

You don't get inspiration sitting at a drawing board or in front of your computer.

People ask what was the first piece of music I wrote. There was no first piece.

Look around at day-to-day life for ideas, and it finds its way into your work.

I genuinely find the most meaningful thing I do is to make music, but also to absorb some sort of creativity.

The pictures I make come from every blink of my lashes.

Being creative is my idea of heaven. I'm just incredibly fortunate that I can do it in artwork. Watercolor is what I started out with. What I love about watercolor is that a lot of happy accidents occur.

I get ideas from everywhere: movies, books, movies, nature - it comes into my brain, it sits there for a while, and it starts coming back out.

An artist's duty is rather to stay open-minded and in a state where he can receive information and inspiration. You always have to be ready for that little artistic Epiphany.

When people think of someone being prolific, it's like, 'He's got a vault with 5,000 songs in it,' or something, but I just kind of pick them out of the air when they float by.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

My inspiration can come from anything - films, the street, paparazzi pictures.

I paint a slice of life, whatever it is that day.

I'm always creating. Whether I'm writing a lyric or making a beat, every day I'm doing something.