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I wake my wife up at 3 a.m. and say, “Listen to this!”

Barry Hannah

I don’t write under the ghost of Faulkner. I live in the same town and find his life and work inspiring, but that’s it. I have a motorcycle and tool along the country lanes. I travel at my own speed.
BARRY HANNAH

Country Motorcycle Writing
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
Time is what makes good stories. Much has been cooking for a long time, and at last finds an out in narration one day. That’s a supreme joy. And why the characters keep showing up.
BARRY HANNAH

Character Joy Long
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
I don’t really believe in a creative-writing major as an undergraduate. It’s a bad idea, terrible. I’ve met creative-writing majors from other places and they don’t know a goddamn thing. They’re the worst students. They just think they’re good because they could pass.
BARRY HANNAH

Believe Thinking Writing
What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is… We are all overbrained and overemotioned.
BARRY HANNAH

Bogs Essence Labyrinth
I wanted very much to be Miles Davis when I was a boy, but without the practice. It just looked like an endless road.
BARRY HANNAH

Boys Endless Practice
The point is to strip down, get protestant, then even more naked. Walk over scorched bricks to find your own soul. Your heart a searching dog in the rubble.
BARRY HANNAH

Dog Heart Soul
If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren’t really there.
BARRY HANNAH

Able Men Suffering
I don’t really care about plot; I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way.
BARRY HANNAH

Care Different Plot
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
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
A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.
BARRY HANNAH

Chosen Jobs Mean
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
I hate to be fatalistic about it, but alcoholism, it’s just in your genes. We had some of it in my family, and it just got me.
BARRY HANNAH

Alcoholism Family Genes Hate

I wake my wife up at 3 a.m. and say, “Listen to this!”

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I wake my wife up at 3 a.m. and say, “Listen to this!”

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