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 HANNAHMy stories do have plot. They’re not just scattered language; they’re controlled, toward an end.
More Barry Hannah Quotes
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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 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.
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You need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy.
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.
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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 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.
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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.
BARRY HANNAH -
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.
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I never pulled a loaded pistol on anybody, but it got around that I did. It got turned into lore. It’s a myth. There’s so much bad gun stuff.
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Love and despair go hand in hand.
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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.
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I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.
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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?
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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.
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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






