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 HANNAHThe 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.
More Barry Hannah Quotes
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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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You need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy.
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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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You’ve got to lie to stay halfway interested in yourself.
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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.
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Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.
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My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.
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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.
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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 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.
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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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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 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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Literature is the history of the soul.
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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