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" I find it hugely exciting to be dealing with another writer's language. "
Johnny Flynn
Language
Find
Dealing
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" I'm not that politically educated. "
Johnny Flynn
Educated
Politically
" When I was young, I was being pushed, against my will, towards becoming a classical musician. I had music scholarships; I had to play the violin and do orchestra practice and that sort of stuff. That meant I didn't get to do any school plays. I desperately wanted to do that. "
Johnny Flynn
Play
Music
School
" We all have these shades in our nature: it's a spectrum within all of us. "
Johnny Flynn
Nature
Within
Shades
" 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. "
Johnny Flynn
Me
Writing
Songs
" A lot of the work I've done has involved playing quite sympathetic characters. "
Johnny Flynn
Playing
Done
Involved
" Loads of verses don't make it into the finished song. "
Johnny Flynn
Song
Finished
Loads
" 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. "
Johnny Flynn
Need
Think
Office
" 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. "
Johnny Flynn
Amazing
Legend
Singing
" 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. "
Johnny Flynn
Now
Music
New
" 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.' "
Johnny Flynn
Listening
People
Getting Older
" I think the truest things come from silence, but everything's always so clogged up with noise. If everything falls away, and you can truly listen to someone, giving them yourself and generosity, you can truly lose yourself in what they're saying. Like, not impose your ideas on what they're saying, but really tune into them. "
Johnny Flynn
Generosity
Silence
Think
" Certain films should only be watched at 40,000 feet. Like, certain comedies and certain, uh, emotionally charged movies. "
Johnny Flynn
Should
Feet
Films
" 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. "
Johnny Flynn
Politics
People
Political
" I definitely asked too many questions of my teachers and was probably a bit facetious at times. "
Johnny Flynn
Bit
Too
Teachers
" 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. "
Johnny Flynn
Fishing
Fish
Family
" I try and stay in my right brain as much as I can, but my left takes over. "
Johnny Flynn
Over
Brain
I Can
" My thing about demos is that you usually prefer them to the finished thing. "
Johnny Flynn
Prefer
Them
You
" 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. "
Johnny Flynn
Think
Challenges
Face
" 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.' "
Johnny Flynn
Write
Now
Like
" Bob Dylan has and Einstein had their own way of perceiving the universe and translating it for us. "
Johnny Flynn
Way
Bob Dylan
Had
" 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. "
Johnny Flynn
Parenting
Hope
Love
" 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. "
Johnny Flynn
Me
Sister
Father
" I'm often the one in my gang of friends who's worried about how we're going to get from A to B. I'm the one running around saying, 'Is somebody going to do something about it?' Everyone else is bit more chilled. "
Johnny Flynn
Running
Saying
Everyone
" We had no money, my dad was out of work a lot, and we never owned a house. It was very hand-to-mouth. "
Johnny Flynn
Money
Work
House
" I had to learn how to work in a studio at first because it's a totally different creative environment to the 'bedroom recordings' I'd done before, where I could translate my own ideas without having to explain them to anyone. "
Johnny Flynn
Environment
Done
Work
" 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. "
Johnny Flynn
Imagination
You
People
" I'm a huge David Hockney fan. "
Johnny Flynn
Huge
David
Fan
" 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. "
Johnny Flynn
Always
Friends
Magical
" I guess I started writing poetry and stuff and then decided to set it to music. "
Johnny Flynn
Music
Stuff
Poetry
" Music always gets bumped until I have some time to get around to it. "
Johnny Flynn
Music
Time
Until