Top 84 Quotes & Sayings by Johnny Flynn

My dad was working class.

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

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.'

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.

In my mind, there's usually a fairly definitive kind of narrative when I write. But I don't want to enforce that on other people. I think that's why I like using metaphor so much.

Westminster politics is very unattractive, and people are channelling political energy into more inward questioning - there are a lot of musicians whose songs are all about feeling, and it's almost like that's the only safe place to express yourself.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I think Bob Odenkirk is phenomenal.

The thing I find really special in performance is that there is this slightly mystical thing that takes over when you're responding to a crowd and engaging in people's imaginations collectively in a room. I've always thought that one of the most incredible things about being alive is going to see some kind of performance like that.

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.

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 try and stay in my right brain as much as I can, but my left takes over.

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.

My father was an actor. Both of my older brothers are actors. My younger sister is an actress. For me, that's my job; that's my craft. But then all through school and through drama school, I was gigging and running nights and playing in bands, and I just didn't want to let that go.

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

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.

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.'

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.

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

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.

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

I'm a huge David Hockney fan.

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.

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

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.

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 had a series of jobs in the small fishing village in West Wales where my family lived when I was a teenager. I worked as a fisherman in the day, and then the skipper and his wife ran a small restaurant - she'd cook the fish he caught.

The truth is there's always a hum of people playing folk music in cities.

I'm obsessed with pilgrimages. I love following old routes, imagining the consciousness of those who walked them.

I'm not that politically educated.

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.

Music always gets bumped until I have some time to get around to it.

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.

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.

The world that I know and the world that I come from is from the arts, and my wife's an artist, and I've been a musician since I left college, and there's tons of musicians I'd love to play.

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

If you're trying to do something wholly new, it's hard to fully trust it. But if you use forms that have come before, it lends your music weight and authority. It's also a way to acknowledge that it's not just you who's feeling these things. The emotions are coming through you from a whole history.

I'm married to the girl that I first went out with when I was 16. We were on and off for years; now we're married with a kid, so I don't have that many exes.

I'm not a funny person.

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

The reason I stopped music for a while and concentrated on theatre was that it was more conducive to parenting; having the days free was quite handy. I love them both. I hope I don't have to compromise one for the other.

I've been cast in a lot of comedies. I've done things like multi-cam sitcoms: you know, 'Seinfeld' type... not as good as 'Seinfeld,' but that kind of thing. I love that stuff.

I've always identified as an actor. That's what I set out to do.

Taking someone else's language and fitting it into your own speech - you learn a lot about other people's brains, doing that.

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

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

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

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

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

Our job as actors is to invent the things that bridge ourselves with the characters, so you have to build something if it's not there - you try and learn what makes people behave in a certain way.

We all have these shades in our nature: it's a spectrum within all of us.

The moment you have children, it's like your heart gets out of your body, puts on clothes, and walks away.

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 actually do bits of my writing in sort of incidental spaces - when I'm traveling on the Tube or on a bus. More often than not, it's a reaction to how you feel about something, and if you're sitting down and concentrating on, 'I must write something,' then you can't have a truthful reaction.

All the adults in my family were actors, so there wasn't much else in terms of role models. I fell in love with that world, being backstage at the theatre.