Top 50 Johnny Flynn Quotes

I like getting older. I always looked younger than I was, and I found that people wouldn’t give me the room to speak. The older I get, it’s like, ‘Oh, I’m still talking, and they’re still listening.’

Not listening is the reason for so many misunderstandings and conflicts.

If you’re in a garage band, it’s about being better than the band in the next-door garage. But in the folk tradition, it’s more a vibe of sharing.

I like really bad puns – proper, red-top, nasty puns – I find them funny.

It’s not in the mainstream media, but across towns, it is amazing how there are small groups of people getting together and forming artistic collectives – they may not be being overtly political, but I’d say by channelling their energy into community projects, that’s a valid political statement.

Loads of verses don’t make it into the finished song.

I sometimes self-edit when it comes to auditions and go, ‘They’re not going to cast me, so I’m not going to do it.’

My dad was working class.

My guitar is a 1934 National Trojan. They call it a resonator, which is the guitar guys played in the honky-tonks before amplification. It’s very loud. It’s the type of guitar that Son House and Robert Johnson played.

Diane Cluck is part of the anti-folk movement in New York. She’s got a really haunting voice, and she usually sings in the pentatonic scale.

A lot of the work I’ve done has involved playing quite sympathetic characters.

Folk music – and what people are now perceiving as being folk music – is music that’s quite close to the ground. The songs sound quite old, even if they’re new. They sound like they’ve been sung by different people for years.

I’m a big Bob Dylan fan. I’m also a blues geek.

I think the two are kind of synonymous for me; songwriting is like my form of diary making. It’s how I process the world. Without doing that, I feel kind of lost. The characters that I play often come out in the songs and the challenges that they face, albeit in an abstract way.

There’s something amazing about ‘Fawlty Towers’ and ‘The Office’ only being two series. I think, when you really nail it, you don’t need to do more than two or three.

I first came across Langhorne Slim when I saw him play live, and he’s an incredibly infectious performer. The way he works the crowd is mind-blowing. You can listen to his music without really listening to his lyrics, but it pays off if you do.

I imagine that, for most people, acting isn’t something they think is a viable option, whereas for me, it was the most viable option. No adults around me knew how to do anything else.

It’s great being an actor and being part of a play or a film where there’s usually quite a big group of people who are collaborating, and your job is really to fit in and share that energy. With music, because I write the songs, it’s a broader, more abstract process.

It’s interesting to marry American musical traditions with the subtlety of English-style storytelling and folk singer-songwriters like Martin Carthy and Bert Jansch – they’re two heritages that are distinct but also cross over on so many levels.

I just said, casually, ‘You know, I passed up on auditioning for Einstein.’ And my friend was like, ‘You idiot, you have to do it!’ She made me do it. I sent the tapes off assuming that somebody would say, ‘Ha ha, very funny.’

I’m not a funny person.

My dad was an actor, and he always said that work was work; you can’t turn your nose up at it. We didn’t have much money when I was growing up, and he had this real work ethic, which I inherited.

The Band mean a lot to me in terms of what I aspire to achieve with my group, as the music they made went against the fashion of the time.

I’m not really interested in myself in my writing. I can’t see myself in the songs, even though I know different parts of me are there.

My dad was an actor, and he made it all seem quite magical. It felt like a slightly subversive thing, telling stories, when all of my other friends’ parents were builders or bank clerks. It’s always seemed quite magical to me.

I’ve never done anything like ‘Brotherhood’ before. It was a great challenge to take up a part in a live audience sitcom – it was amazing.

I like the idea of letting the music do its own work and the stories being more expressionful – if that’s a word – in people’s imagination. I’ve just got a thing about people and songs telling you how you should feel.

My only incentive is to write music that changes me, where the process of making it is a discovery and is true in some way, at that moment.

I feel really lucky that I somehow have blagged my way into loads of different experiences. I find making a film fascinating, I find making a play amazing, and working with my band and scoring things… it’s all really cool. I’m just a glutton for experience, really.

It’s great to be able to write songs and draw on life, to write truthfully, and to be able to do that, it’s good to be exploring other stuff as well.

I don’t really write songs. They’re just there anyway, chiseling away at the atmosphere, and suddenly they’re like, ‘Oh, thanks for coming. Thanks for finding me. We’ll share each other now.’

What’s quite nice about this whole folk movement is that it’s born out of genuine friendship. And nobody’s infringing on anybody’s space.

I guess I started writing poetry and stuff and then decided to set it to music.

In my early twenties, the whole experience of going on tour was like losing myself in this slightly wild environment.

Certain films should only be watched at 40,000 feet. Like, certain comedies and certain, uh, emotionally charged movies.

I grew up playing classical violin and a lot of Bach and Mozart and the things that Einstein loved.

I find it hugely exciting to be dealing with another writer’s language.

I played trumpet for Noah and the Whale a couple of times.

I think Bob Odenkirk is phenomenal.

I can’t remember a ‘best gig,’ and my brain doesn’t work in absolute terms like that.

You might as well acknowledge what came before, because you can never do something wholly new. It’s not unoriginal to make your references clear.

The pop industry is so well-practised at channelling young people’s creative energy that I think it gets abused.

I did a lot of theater as a young actor in my early twenties, and my first few records really came from writing songs through the rehearsal processes.

I fell in love with the legend of Paul Robeson as a kid. My dad would tell me all these amazing stories about his life and, bizarrely, ended up singing to Robeson on his deathbed.

We had no money, my dad was out of work a lot, and we never owned a house. It was very hand-to-mouth.

When I first moved to London, there was talk of a folk revival, with annoying names like nu-folk that made me feel slightly ill.

I have a classical music background. I studied violin and trumpet.

My thing about demos is that you usually prefer them to the finished thing.

I’m a huge David Hockney fan.

Bob Dylan has and Einstein had their own way of perceiving the universe and translating it for us.