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

Harvey: "It's so much in me to want to keep experimenting all the time. It's just inherent. Therefore I keep reaching for instruments I don't particularly know how to play, and then I become excited."

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

Harvey: "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."

Harvey: "I decide immediately if I like a person and if I do, then I'm myself, and if I don't, then I give nothing."

Harvey: "With songs I almost see the images, see the action, and then all I have to do is describe it. It's almost like watching a scene from a film, and that's what I go about trying to catch in a song."

Harvey: "I don't loathe interviews, I'm just one of those people who makes music because I find it difficult to talk."

Harvey: "I come from an art-school background, and I still feel that in my music, it's about exploration and challenging myself, about putting myself in a place that's frightening because I haven't been there before."

Harvey: "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."

Harvey: "I don't think that much anymore in terms of 'write a record, record a record, tour a record,' because in my own mind, things have changed, in that I'm just an ongoing artist. I'm not quite sure what the next project needs to be until it presents himself, and then I know. I just follow dutifully while I'm being led."

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

Harvey: "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."

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

Harvey: "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."

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

Harvey: "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."

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

Harvey: "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."

Harvey: "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."

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

Harvey: "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."

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