Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm not a funny person.
I'm a huge David Hockney fan.
I think Bob Odenkirk is phenomenal.
I'm a big Bob Dylan fan. I'm also a blues geek.
Loads of verses don't make it into the finished song.
I played trumpet for Noah and the Whale a couple of times.
I've always identified as an actor. That's what I set out to do.
I have a classical music background. I studied violin and trumpet.
Music always gets bumped until I have some time to get around to it.
I find it hugely exciting to be dealing with another writer's language.
Not listening is the reason for so many misunderstandings and conflicts.
I like really bad puns - proper, red-top, nasty puns - I find them funny.
We all have these shades in our nature: it's a spectrum within all of us.
The truth is there's always a hum of people playing folk music in cities.
My thing about demos is that you usually prefer them to the finished thing.
A lot of the work I've done has involved playing quite sympathetic characters.
I can't remember a 'best gig,' and my brain doesn't work in absolute terms like that.
Bob Dylan has and Einstein had their own way of perceiving the universe and translating it for us.
I grew up playing classical violin and a lot of Bach and Mozart and the things that Einstein loved.
We had no money, my dad was out of work a lot, and we never owned a house. It was very hand-to-mouth.
The moment you have children, it's like your heart gets out of your body, puts on clothes, and walks away.
The pop industry is so well-practised at channelling young people's creative energy that I think it gets abused.
I'm obsessed with pilgrimages. I love following old routes, imagining the consciousness of those who walked them.
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.'
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 really love a lot of early Sixties R&B, rock n' roll, and I love performing songs that have that power and soulfulness.
Taking someone else's language and fitting it into your own speech - you learn a lot about other people's brains, doing that.
I think everyone in their 30s looks back at their 20s and thinks, 'Oh God, if I'd just done this and this, and not done that.'
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'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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Weirdly, my dad didn't want me to become an actor, he was always quite resistant to it. He told me as much many times. That just made it more attractive to me.
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'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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.'