I grew up when people seemed actually to be hurting themselves for their art. Of course, some of it was phony.
BARRY HANNAHVoice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you… they’re a little away from you.
More Barry Hannah Quotes
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I don’t really care about plot; I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way.
BARRY HANNAH -
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.
BARRY HANNAH -
You’ve got to lie to stay halfway interested in yourself.
BARRY HANNAH -
If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren’t really there.
BARRY HANNAH -
I wanted very much to be Miles Davis when I was a boy, but without the practice. It just looked like an endless road.
BARRY HANNAH -
Where is the angry machine of all of us? Why is God such a blurred magician? Why are you begging for your life if you believe those things? Prove to me that you’re better than the rabbits we ate last night.
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 always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.
BARRY HANNAH -
Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you… they’re a little away from you.
BARRY HANNAH -
The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.
BARRY HANNAH -
Professional Southerners sicken me.
BARRY HANNAH -
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 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 -
I wake my wife up at 3 a.m. and say, “Listen to this!”
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 -
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 -
Love and despair go hand in hand.
BARRY HANNAH -
Time is what makes good stories. Much has been cooking for a long time, and at last finds an out in narration one day. That’s a supreme joy. And why the characters keep showing up.
BARRY HANNAH -
Literature is the history of the soul.
BARRY HANNAH -
What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is… We are all overbrained and overemotioned.
BARRY HANNAH -
A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.
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.
BARRY HANNAH -
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 -
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 -
Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.
BARRY HANNAH -
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