Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you… they’re a little away from you.
BARRY HANNAHMy best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.
More Barry Hannah Quotes
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You’ve got to lie to stay halfway interested in yourself.
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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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I grew up when people seemed actually to be hurting themselves for their art. Of course, some of it was phony.
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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.
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Professional Southerners sicken me.
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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 -
My stories do have plot. They’re not just scattered language; they’re controlled, toward an end.
BARRY HANNAH -
I found out about reviews early on. They’re mostly written by sad men on bad afternoons. That’s probably why I’m less angry than some writers, who are so narcissistic they consider every line of every review, even a thoughtful one, as major treason.
BARRY HANNAH -
My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.
BARRY HANNAH -
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 -
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 -
I’ll tell you why I like writing: it’s just jumping into a pool. I get myself into a kind of trance. I engage the world, but it’s also wonderful to just escape. I try to find the purities out of the confusion. It’s pretty old-fashioned, but it’s fun.
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I wake my wife up at 3 a.m. and say, “Listen to this!”
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What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is… We are all overbrained and overemotioned.
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I was always kind of florid. And full of rhetoric. That was my flaw. My whole time writing, I’ve had to work against that because it can be a wrecking posture.
BARRY HANNAH