P. J. Harvey quotes:

People like Howlin' Wolf, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, John Lee Hooker, Nina Simone, Captain Beefheart - all of these artists were what I grew up listening to every day of my life. And there's a very healthy music scene in the west country of England, where I grew up.

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'm not a writer where I feel particularly blessed by great inspiration every day. I don't. I have to work really hard at it to try and say the things I'm concerned with.

I firmly disbelieve that one has to be a tortured soul to write good music.

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.

Making me into a role model is placing too much importance on what I see as a work in progress.

There's also a level of discipline I use as a writer, designed to get better at what I'm doing, that requires quite a lot of study and quite a lot of hard work as well.

I did photography, painting, and drawing, but I prefer sculpture. I like it because it's very physical.

I was a visual artist primarily and a writer, even from a very young age.

I'm a Libra. That means that I can make a decision, but only after much thought.

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.

People have a tendency to see country life through rose-colored glasses.

My father is actually a quarry man - he deals in stone. He also at one point had a lot of sheep, he owned a sheep farm, but primarily the family business was in stone.

Well, I don't really concern myself too much with what other people make of my work.

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've always felt that I'm affected by the world, by the way we treat each other, by the way different countries treat each other.

I'm probably much more influenced by film-makers and painters than I am by other songwriters or poets.

I'm not an autobiographical writer, but I am a writer who deals with human emotion on all levels.

There's so much you can do with laying words on a bed of music. You can completely change their meaning with the type of music or the way they're sung.

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.

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

I think that's always very valuable: to keep the mind open to receiving all sorts of information, which can then be used in my work, but also just as a human being.

I'm a very private person, so obviously I don't enjoy talking about more personal matters.

I literally left school and went straight into music via art college for a year, and I've been so involved in my job of writing songs that the more actively involved part became channeled into standing on the stage and saying things that way.