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Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you… they’re a little away from you.

Barry Hannah

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

Inspiration Listen Love Say Wife
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
My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.
BARRY HANNAH

Concern Form Stories
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
You need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy.
BARRY HANNAH

Great Hell Joy Needs
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 always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.
BARRY HANNAH

Audience Country Light Misjudge
What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is… We are all overbrained and overemotioned.
BARRY HANNAH

Bogs Essence Labyrinth
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

Beautiful Thinking Two
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
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
Love and despair go hand in hand.
BARRY HANNAH

Despair Feel Hands Love
My stories do have plot. They’re not just scattered language; they’re controlled, toward an end.
BARRY HANNAH

Language Plot Stories
The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.
BARRY HANNAH

Deep Howl Wretched
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

Belief Gratitude Writing

Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you… they’re a little away from you.

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Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you… they’re a little away from you.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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