P. J. Harvey Quotes

Everybody is different. Some people like to share more. I just wouldn't want to spoil someone's opinion of me by them knowing me as a person instead of an artist.

If you're not observing the world around you, in some sense you're not really an artist because then that means you're just replicating other people's stuff, or, I don't even know what you're doing.

The aim of the sculptor is to convince us that he is a sculptor; the aim of the orator, is to convince us that he is not an orator.

You should be able to do you. That's what differentiates an artist from a singer.

The reason why everything I do is so different is not because I'm trying to be provocative; it's simply a reflection of whatever was happening to me at the time I wrote that particular record.

I think I just have to be myself. No one can write the songs I do, and no one can sing the way I do - I believe that's important for every artist to remember.

An artist is a person who has invented an artist.

One can't help but bring one's own personality into what one is doing, and it's certainly true of us actors and it's true of writers.

We are living in a world where the individual must learn to command the raw materials of expression. He must not be dependent all the time on the ready-made, the finished product. It's the transferring, the changing of the raw into what is the expression of your own self – the whole joy and satisfaction and frustration of life is built into this.

Even if it's such a lowly art as TV, you've got to get stuff off your chest, because that's what makes something different and original, your particular take on stuff.

Definitely. The way I look is a reflection of who I am. That's how my music is too.

I don't have an image of myself, when I'm walking down the street, like I'm a rock star or something. I'm a human being, I'm a friend, I'm a mom, I'm a writer, and I'm an artist. I do play electric guitar and all of that but in the end I'm just a person. I really don't live like a rock star, economically or socially. I still live a pretty simple life beside the traveling aspect of it.

Artists should never look at pictures, but should stutter in a language of their own.

I never had a problem with genre because a genre actually is like a uniform - you put yourself into a certain uniform. But if you dress up in a police officer's uniform, it doesn't mean that you are an officer; it can mean something else. But this is the starting point, and the best way is to not to fit into this uniform but to make this uniform a part of yourself.

I'm just enjoying playing a character of myself. People's mouths drop when I dance, but my friends are like, "You dance like that in the kitchen!"

I'm a sponge, the more I absorb, the more I am able to articulate my vision, as artists do, like Picasso. I'm an artist in that light. I went from being an artist to an artiste.

They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist.

I think perhaps I've learned to be myself. I have a theory that all artists who would be important - painters and writers - must learn to be themselves. It takes a very long time.

I'll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette.

Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.

In my career I defined myself by my music, and the danger is that one defines oneself based on popularity. As you know, that goes up and down, and you can't judge how you feel about yourself based on what your sales is.

I used to sing like Nat King Cole. I mean he was the guy when I was comin' up, and you know, man, people used to say of me, "Damn, he sure do sound like Nat King Cole." But there was a day, and luckily for me it was early, when I woke up and asked myself, "Well, when are the ask me to sing because I sound like me?" So my advice is, never do anything that you don't like.

A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.

Art is an experience, not an object.

Every production must resemble its author.