P. J. Harvey Quotes

For me, writing never gets easier. It's always hard work. It doesn't matter how many words you wrote the day before, or how many novels you've completed in the last decade: every day you start fresh again with that same blank page, or that same blank screen.

At the outset, my notion of being a writer was that you would have moments of inspiration and moments of frustration, when you'd crumple up your pages and toss them away. On one side, the dustbin would fill up, and on the other side, pages would rise into a novel.

There are three things that make a person a writer: inspiration, perspiration and desperation.

Writing has got to be some of the hardest work I know.

Mine is not a story to tell struggling writers.

Anybody who likes writing a book is an idiot. Because it's impossible; it's like having a homework assignment every stinking day until it's done. And by the time you get it in, it's done and you're sitting there reading it, and you realize the 12,000 things you didn't do. I mean, writing isn't fun. It's never been fun.

My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don't.

The biggest mistake you can make is assuming that creativity will hit you all at once and the muse will carry you to the end of the book on feather wings while 'Foster the People' plays gently in the background. Storytelling is work. Pleasurable work, usually, but it is work.

Writing is agony for me. I work at it eight hours every day, hoping to get six pages, but I am satisfied with three.

It is hard work to give life to new characters every single day. It is not as if I am God. I am just a tired, middle-aged woman trying to keep going.

Yeah, writers do hate writing.

The most important lesson my parents taught me is that writing is a job, one that requires discipline and commitment. Most of the time it's a fun job, a wonderful job, but sometimes it isn't, and those are the days that test you.

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don't think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.

I don't know any writer for whom it comes easily. Maybe John Updike - a story would just seem to come to him whole, you know, out of a personal experience. But the rest of us, I think, are not so lucky, and I had to work hard, yeah.

In terms of people who want to be writers, I wish more people knew how much work it was.

Of course I knew that writing was terrifically hard work and that there was no secret code, as in a video game, that would unlock Tolstoy-mode, enabling me to crank out canon-worthy novellas before lunch.

I think I'm more sympathetic to writers, to the work and the struggle and the craft of it, than when I was in graduate school at NYU and was very judgmental.

I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version, but then you write the version that you can write.

Writing a book is a long and difficult process for me. I'm a slow writer, so I spend the year with Elvis Cole and Joe Pike in my head. I was thinking about this the other day. I wrote the first book in 1987. Literally every day since that time, Elvis and Joe have been in my head. They're always there. I started these guys because I like them.

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.

I thought I could write. So it was my intention to start off as a writer. But I wasn't really great at delivering the word at the end of the day.

Yes, it's hard to write. But it's harder not to.

I'm not one of these 'the characters write themselves; the story just fell out of me' kind of writers. Wish it was like that.

I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work.