Top Takeaways from Tim Minchin

Tim Minchin closed the festival in conversation with comedian Larry Budd about making things when the world seems determined to distract, exhaust or enrage you. He drew on two decades of comedy, songwriting and musical theatre, including Matilda and Groundhog Day, and on the periods when the work, the motivation or the money dried up. The recurring argument was that creativity is less about waiting for inspiration than about showing up and doing the next small thing.

Top Takeaways

“There’s a fallacy that we commit, and there’s a fallacy about that fallacy.”

“Everything is clickbait, even the good news.”

“I’ve decided my job is not to create more content that creates that anxiety.”

“I care very much about telling stories that reflect human nature.”

“You are beautiful because of your damage not despite it.”

“We lead with our scars.”

“I’m always unconscious of myself in a room.”

“I really like people in all their weirdness.”

“You might as well go about life as if you have free will.”

“You don’t generate your thoughts, your thoughts generate you.”

“The only way we can make the world a better place is to meet people where they’re at with outreach and conversation and art, art, art.”

“Everyone outputting their inputs.”

Further Reading

• You Don’t Have to Have a Dream: Advice for the Incrementally Ambitious, Tim Minchin (Penguin, 2024). Link
• The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin (Canongate, 2023). Link
• Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, Elizabeth Gilbert (Bloomsbury, 2015). Link
• Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It, Oliver Burkeman (Bodley Head, 2021). Link
• When I Grow Up, Tim Minchin, illustrated by Steve Antony (Scholastic, 2017). Link

Further Listening and Watching

• Upright, Sky Atlantic and NOW, created by and starring Tim Minchin. Link
• Tim Minchin on Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, 2012, BBC Sounds. Link
• Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical, film, 2022, Netflix. Link
• Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast: Tim Minchin, episode 1. Link
• Sodajerker On Songwriting: Tim Minchin, episode 181. Link

Further Help

• Help Musicians: Music Minds Matter, 24 hour mental health support line for people in music, 0808 802 8008. Link
• Arts Council England, funding and support for creative practitioners, including Developing Your Creative Practice grants. Link
• Mind, information on burnout and stress. Link
• Samaritans, call 116 123, free, 24 hours a day. Link