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A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.

Barry Hannah

I wouldn’t buy somebody’s album on a dare if they called him a musician’s musician. I don’t write to be a writer’s writer. I don’t want to be like the little-magazine writer.
BARRY HANNAH

Album Musician Writing
The first two drinks were always wonderfully liberating. You think better. You’re braver, and you’ll say anything. If you could just hang in there with two or three, it’d be beautiful. The trouble was I couldn’t.
BARRY HANNAH

Beautiful Thinking Two
Children will listen to anything elders say to survive, and if you grew up without an elder telling you there was a god, what did your parents say to you?
BARRY HANNAH

Children Grew Parents Up
My stories do have plot. They’re not just scattered language; they’re controlled, toward an end.
BARRY HANNAH

Language Plot Stories
Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you… they’re a little away from you.
BARRY HANNAH

Away Littles Trance Voice
If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren’t really there.
BARRY HANNAH

Able Men Suffering
The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.
BARRY HANNAH

Deep Howl Wretched
I lost my second marriage because of drinking, and I loved the woman very much. But I thought I needed booze to write. I’m glad I was disabused.
BARRY HANNAH

Drinking Love Writing
The wild stuff is all so overrated. Drinking, you don’t feel good all the time. There’s a lot of down, a lot of misery.
BARRY HANNAH

Drinking Feel Good Stuff
I distrust thought. The interior life is highly overrated. I don’t like the wispy and the vague… or inductive logic in any kind of writing. I’m impatient with writers who make too much sense. The better things that I’ve done have come to me by instinct.
BARRY HANNAH

Done Much Too Vague Writing
Literature is the history of the soul.
BARRY HANNAH

History Literature Soul
I thought I was writing for a fairly hip, intelligent crowd; I just thought there were more of them out there. But they’re not. They’re not out there waiting. They’re not gonna use their intelligence on your book.
BARRY HANNAH

Book Intelligent Writing
My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.
BARRY HANNAH

Concern Form Stories
I do believe that as you write more and age, the arrogance and most of the vanity goes. Or it is a vanity met with vast gratitude, that you were hit by something as you stood in the way of it, that anybody is listening.
BARRY HANNAH

Belief Gratitude Writing
Most novels I come across have all the excitement of a long trip on a bus with a sensitive glee club. Yammer and chat.
BARRY HANNAH

Clubs Glee Long
When you’re not involved, other people’s unhappiness seems to be about the funniest damn thing on earth because you think you can solve it, that you are God, that you are above this, and that their unhappiness is just such useless toil and agony. If it’s you, it ceases to be a comedy.
BARRY HANNAH

Agony People Thinking

A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.

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A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.

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