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Professional Southerners sicken me.

Barry Hannah

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

Flaws Kind Writing
Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don’t get it. I don’t get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I’m doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn’t think you ever had.
BARRY HANNAH

Thinking Two 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 wake my wife up at 3 a.m. and say, “Listen to this!”
BARRY HANNAH

Inspiration Listen Love Say Wife
My stories do have plot. They’re not just scattered language; they’re controlled, toward an end.
BARRY HANNAH

Language Plot Stories
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
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
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
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.
BARRY HANNAH

Fun Jumping Writing
Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.
BARRY HANNAH

Joy Narrative Pain
I grew up when people seemed actually to be hurting themselves for their art. Of course, some of it was phony.
BARRY HANNAH

Art Hurt People
I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.
BARRY HANNAH

Audience Country Light Misjudge
There was no one, when I was in school, who talked about going in and blowing up students. The teachers were very stern and hateable, but nobody ever mentioned murder.
BARRY HANNAH

School Students Teacher
My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.
BARRY HANNAH

Concern Form Stories
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
The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.
BARRY HANNAH

Deep Howl Wretched

Professional Southerners sicken me.

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Professional Southerners sicken me.

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