P. J. Harvey Quotes

[On political correctness:] Any intended message mattered less than the received message, and every received message could be interpreted in whatever way the receiver wanted.

If you hear the question wrong, you will answer wrong.

It is interesting to watch yourself on a reality show. It makes you think about the things that you say and how what you meant to convey can be so easily miscommunicated and misunderstood.

one does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.

The way you write affects what you say.

Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them.

Writing is the best way to talk without being interrupted.

I was once told by someone wise that writing is perilous as you cannot always guarantee your words will be read in the spirit in which they were written.

I get a lot of people complaining about my ambiguity, often in cases which there is nothing ambigous at all. As far as I can see, people read it when they were half stoned and listening to the TV. Then they come back and say gee, it's impossible to figure out what's going on in a story.

My films are misinterpreted all the time. I don't mind that. Everybody's films are misinterpreted. But there's no malice or stupidity in the people that misinterpret them. You know what you do, but someone else sees it, and they want to talk about it or write about it, and so they misinterpret them.

How was I to know? ... You didn't say anything.""I said lots of things," he corrected gently. "You just didn't hear them.

I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don't.

Here’s how a child listens: you tell him something, and he puts his own interpretation on what you said. That’s what he hears. No one has ever heard you.

I say one thing, you write another, and those who read you understand still something else! I say: cross, death, kingdom of heaven, God...and what do you understand? Each of you attaches his own suffering, interests and desires to each of these sacred words, and my words disappear, my soul is lost. I can't stand it any longer!

In the absence of feedback, people will fill in the blanks with a negative. They will assume you don’t care about them or don’t like them.

Everyone only hears what he understands.

Your words and my words are the same, but not our meaning.

A letter is a risky thing; the writer gambles on the reader's frame of mind.

I asked you, baby, If you understood- You told me that you didn't, But you thought you would.

It was strange how you could never form any conclusion from what women said. It was not that they did not know what they were talking about, but you never drew the right conclusions.

I just said what I said and it was wrong. Or it was taken wrong. And now it's all this.

It's dreadful what little things lead people to misunderstand each other.

Never think, because you cannot write a letter easily, that it is better not to write at all. The most awkward note imaginable is better than none.

One says a lot in vain, refusing; The other mainly hears the "No."

Writing is a form of talking, although writing is such an odd thing in and of itself. People go about it in such different ways.