Johnny Flynn Quotes

'Birdman' came from a very beautiful side of me, from a part of honesty and surrender about things.

I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

You can't write about stuff you don't know about. You have to live it. You have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Live life to be a good songwriter.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

In songwriting, I needed language. And I always believed in singing about what I do.

Most of the songs I wrote are personal.

Most of the songs I write are just very directly from my life. I don't have a big imagination. Whenever I tried to write from fantasy, it comes out sounding really fake.

I'm not afraid to use my personal experiences and put them into a song. I think that's when you get the best stuff anyway, when it's real emotion.

Every song I've ever written has been based in reality, based in fact, things that happen to me.

In order for me to write, I have to experience life. I write the songs based on real life, and I perform them from a very real place.

I write my songs because I've lived them.

I'm self-deprecating, but I'm an artist, too. I have to write new songs to chronicle stuff for myself. I write a song like 'Middle Age' or 'Responsibility' or 'I Just Work Here,' and it's about how bleak life can be. But it's real.

Art is about expressing the true nature of the human spirit in whatever way one wishes to express it. If it is honest, it is beautiful. If it is not honest, it is obvious.

I wrote my first song when I was 54 years old.

Whatever's going on in my life shows up in the writing room.

I feel like a lyricist is somebody that writes their own lyrics. Now songwriters and lyricists are two totally different things. You can't really be a lyricist if you didn't write your lyrics. There's no passion, there's nothing in it coming from you. It's somebody else's feelings and you just taking it and running with it.

The way to write really good songs is to write about the things that happen in your life and where you are in the moment, and writing about stuff that happens in your 30s is not the sexiest song subject.

A lot of my songs are about things that concern me personally, not a heightened version of myself or any of the characters that I play.

The more wild experiences you have, the better songs you can write.

I love writing about things I know, and I like to be very honest in my music.

I have never been able to separate - nor have I wanted to - my personal love and desire for truth, passion, and understanding from my lyrics.

Man, I live out 90 percent of my songs and the other 10 percent... once in a while, I'll put myself in someone else's shoes and try to go down that road.

The older you get, the more you have to talk about, and music is a really good outlet. I've chilled on it a little bit, and I can't wait to see what I'm going to step into, now that I have this collection of things.

I'm a songwriter, and people will tell you the greatest stories about their lives, whether you want to hear it or not.

There's a lot of reflection that goes on whenever I write a song - it's been a wild whirlwind last couple of years and there's a lot to talk about, and hopefully that's evident in the music.