P. J. Harvey Quotes

I was so young when the Killers started. I was 21. I'm proud of those songs, but there's no way I would write 'Somebody Told Me,' as I get older. Especially after having kids.

The more my work improves or broadens or widens, the more surely I tame myself.

Yes, I did lock myself in my room for about two years and write some songs and things like that. But I don't feel like I missed out on a whole lot.

I don't think much of anything I wrote before the age of 30.

I borrowed a guitar at age 16 and taught myself to play because I wanted to write songs.

When you're seventeen to early twenties, that's the time you're trying to work out who you are. If you're trying to make some kind of artistic or creative impact, that's the age when you start to figure out how to do that.

I really started writing music to challenge myself, to see what I could write.

I started writing songs, I guess, when I was about 13 or 14, but I didn't know if they were good enough yet or anything.

Every time you come out with an album or a song, you want to feel like you're growing a bit in what you are and giving people something that they can feel.

I feel like the more I work on different songs and the more I work on my voice constantly... I always feel better after I post a cover. Even if it's doing the little 15 second covers, I'm working on my craft, and it's really good for me, and I feel good after I do it.

Busking taught me so much on so many levels, not just about being a musician or writing songs - actually about growing up and being a human!

The more songs I've written, the more I've grown interested in telling a story. When I first began, I had this list of opaque phrases where you can make of it what you want.

With 'Fate's Right Hand,' I think I reached a level of completeness in forming and articulating ideas at around the same time I reached a place where I could match it with my singing voice. It was a kind of coming together.

Making music is like school to me.

I was writing rap at 12 years old and began writing songs as a 20-year-old. I think I wrote my first song in the winter of 2008-2009, when I was in Buenos Aires. I was writing about growing up and my boys back home.

I know as far as I'm concerned, I'm getting really excited about writing, and I'm taking guitar and vocal lessons.

I don't want things that I regret in life, and things that I have not done - and I don't want to at 80 years wake up, and tell myself: 'Oh I was on top of my shape and skills and I didn't do it.'

As time progressed, my songwriting developed out of my bass, because that's all I could do. I decided to take it as far as it could go and to use my skill as a tool.

I used to feel this need to prove to people that I can do something dramatic. But, the truth is that I don't know if I can. I don't think I have it in my skill set. It would be great, but I do love making comedies. It's been so much fun for me, and I hope that I can continue to do it.

I think that I have grown a lot as an artist. I have been writing about my experiences of love and overcoming the struggles that I have faced in the music industry. I have so much more to tell my fans, and I know so much more about myself. It is crazy how much I have grown over these past years.

The first song I wrote was the first song I remember thinking, "Well, maybe I can do something here." The very first one. By the second one I knew I could do something.

All the craft skills that I have, I feel like I developed and honed in drama school. It's the most important thing for me.

I think the songs I was writing after Aeroplane were full of a lot of undealt-with pain that was just a little too big... the issues seemed too large for me to confront intuitively through songwriting. I kept pushing it and pushing it. There are so many issues about being human and why people inflict pain on each other. There were seeds of all these things I hadn't dealt with. With just the personal issues, I felt I was in over my head, but then to write about it... To write you have to have at least a little bit of confidence you know what you're talking about.

Songwriting is a really fortunate skill to have to frame living and to find new ways to observe things you're going through.

I was writing tons of music in my spare time. I might be on location somewhere, and I'd go home and I'd have my guitar and my little keyboard or something and write music. Or if I was at home, on my piano. I've always been a late bloomer with a lot of things, just in general, so I think this was something that needed to come to fruition in this particular way.