P. J. Harvey Quotes

Songs are as sad as the listener.

Music is life. Music defines peoples' experience on this planet. Name one time in your life that wasn't punctuated by the music you listened to at the time. When people are down, they listen to music that commiserates that emotion. When people are amped up, they listen to more upbeat, loud songs.

I want people to feel good after I sing.

I figured out 'The Sixth Sense' in the first 10 minutes. I still found the movie touching.

Different people get different things out of the images. It doesn't matter what it's about, all that matters is how it makes you feel.

People relate to songs so differently. No matter what it's about in reality, people create their own meaning behind it and connect with it on their own terms.

Music hits everyone differently every single day.

Like when I hear a beat, it might make you feel a way, but then it might make me feel a completely different way.

I just want people to feel the emotion that's in the record. For me it's very raw and beautiful, I guess it's kind of like a diary for me. I'd love for people to be able to listen to it and it make them dance and cry and the same time.

Love meant different things to different people.

I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn't mean much.

I'd rather people interpret the songs and get whatever they can out of them instead of thinking about me crying in a room with a guitar.

What a strange power the perception of beauty is! It seems to ebb and flow like some secret tide, independent alike of health and disease, of joy or sorrow. There are times in our lives when we seem to go singing on our way, and when the beauty of the world sets itself like a quiet harmony to the song we uplift.

On the last album, I didn't want to disturb the melody with too many stories. This time, I wanted to know if I was able to create images with words, with the sound of words.(...) I think that’s a good thing when the one who is listening, is feeling it in a different way that the one who creates. We are all listening with different perspectives.(...) I don’t want to impose my subjectivity to the listener.

Music sounds different to the one who plays it. It is the musician's curse.

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music as if for the first time, as if I had never heard it before. Being so inescapably a part of it, I'll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels, and that's too bad.

I don't know why people see the things that they do. I wouldn't pay to see them, they don't touch me or move me in any way.

I do not want [photography] explained to me in terms of... formulas, learned, but so hopelessly unsatisfying. I do not want my butterfly stuck on a pin and put in a glass case. I want to see the sunlight on its wings as it flits from flower to flower and I don't care a rap what its Latin name may be.

The movie on the screen is always going to be different from the movie in your head. How it makes you feel is what I'm after, what I'm chasing, and what I'm trying to construct.

I think everybody reacts to entertainment with a different kind of visceral way, probably mostly based on their own personal experiences.

If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.

A good song to one person could just be something mediocre to somebody else. It's always strange thinking about how songs connect with people.

I do what I can to convey what I experience before nature and most often, in order to succeed in conveying what I feel, I totally forget the most elementary rules of painting, if they exist that is.

Why I love acting is that it's totally subjective and I like that. I like that.

My strength and my weakness is that I see normally impersonal events vividly and personally.