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

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.

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.

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.

I take them both seriously - I don't particularly want to be an 'actor-musician.' I want to play the great challenging parts, to be right for the part, rather than just, 'Oh, he can play the fiddle.'

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

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I definitely asked too many questions of my teachers and was probably a bit facetious at times.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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

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

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'm a huge David Hockney fan.

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.'

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

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 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 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.