Garrett Hedlund

“Nashville is a lot like my hometown. You learn so quickly once someone hears something about you or sees something, everybody talks about it at dinner. They know your business, so people tend to be more private and not to throw themselves into everyone's faces.”

“My biggest thing has always been privacy. With an interview such as this where the questions are about me, I struggle to express myself. I have an immediate answer in my head of what I'd say, but sometimes I feel that it would be too honest. So these wheels of censorship start going around my head.”

“I used to be sick of the backroads of Minnesota. I had to drive 30 miles to get home every day, take the schoolbus for two hours. But to drive through America and see the backroads, from Nashville to Memphis, Lovick to New Mexico, was incredible. It was probably the greatest trip of my life.”

“It's funny, though, speaking of fathers and sons, because me and John Goodman played father and son, like, five or six years ago in the film 'Death Sentence,' and I got back with him again in 'Inside Llewyn Davis.'”

“I remember driving the tractor on our farm, and Tim McGraw would be on the radio. I'd find myself walking out of class, singing his songs. And then Tim ended up playing my father in 'Friday Night Lights.' It was surreal.”

“I grew up on a farm in a small town where you do or say one thing and everybody knows about it. You see it happen, there's always the town gossip - 'Oh did you hear about so and so, or did you hear what went on in this household?' So I learned at a very young age just to keep my mouth shut.”

“I'm not good at chatting right away. Women have to be very patient with me, I suppose.”

“I had to jump on the tractor and do my chores. I would have just killed to be in town, to be able to Rollerblade hand-in-hand with somebody I had a crush on. I just wanted to get off the farm, to find my outlet.”

“I spill it out as fast as I can. I don't really edit. In Brazil, recently, I wrote 70 pages. In London, 80 pages.”

“I remember telling my creative writing teacher that you never want to have a journal, because if you lose it, then someone's going to know all your secrets. And then she stopped using a journal, but I always write everything down... Anytime I travel, I try and fill up notepads.”

“It's funny that I got to do 'On the Road' because the thing that had the biggest impact on me growing up was reading books. I was very inspired by the book and this spirit of Dean Moriarty and how envious we all are of somebody who can be that carefree.”

“When I read the 'Country Strong' script, I thought, 'Can't they just hand-double it? Can't I just do the rest of the movie and not have to do the performing?' It took me six months to learn to sing and play guitar at the same time.”

“You might think the thinner version of yourself is going to be the most positive or confident, but that's not how it is for me. When I'm over 200 pounds, that's when I'm the most confident version of myself.”

“When my senior prom was happening, I was in Malta filming 'Troy.'”

“I've always romanticized the late '40s and '50s - the cars, jazz, the open roads and lack of pollution. Now there are more vehicles, less hitchhikers, more billboards and power lines and stuff. People wrote wonderful long letters that took months to receive, and now everything is email.”

“Just personally, I've been attached to 'On the Road' since 2007 and it was the greatest thing in my life when I got cast in it. I couldn't believe it. When I was 17 and read the book, I looked it up on IMDb and it said that Francis Ford Coppola was going to direct it.”

“For me, and this may not be everybody, but because I do love country music so much, there's such a feeling of home in Nashville, especially because it's such a small town. You bring up one song, everybody knows who wrote it, everybody knows their mother and what their cell number is, and all of the stories.”

“Growing up, I would watch a movie on video and would go to the back of the VHS and locate the address for Universal Pictures or MGM or whatever. I'd write to the studios asking them if I could be in a movie. They never wrote me back.”

“I had done chorus before in school, but I was only trying for an easy A. I was a bass going 'dum dum da doo wop.'”

“I grew up on a farm where we had one radio station and it was all country.”