Quotes from P. J. Harvey

My mother and father are very involved with music. It's completely part of their soul. They have an incredible record collection, all vinyl, of some of the best artists, in my eyes, that you can come across.

I've always been very visceral in that I feel things very deeply.

I was a visual artist primarily and a writer, even from a very young age. I wrote a lot of stories and poetry and... I had a desire to create always. And I always had a desire to show my work.

I didn't know folk music growing up, no. It's something I've come to study, really, because I think there's so much to learn from traditional music in the sense of the way music began as a way of communication, the traveling storyteller, the bard, the minstrels.

My mom is a sculptress.

I tried to use words that were dealing with the emotional quality that any human being could recognize in the way that they felt about their country. It's to do with the world we live in. That world is a brutal one and full of war. It's also full of many wonderful things and love and hope.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing, and I don't ever feel like I'm working in a cycle in that respect, because it's every day anyway, no matter what I'm doing. Then I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems, or sometimes not.