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 HANNAHI wake my wife up at 3 a.m. and say, “Listen to this!”
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.
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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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 -
What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is… We are all overbrained and overemotioned.
BARRY HANNAH -
My stories do have plot. They’re not just scattered language; they’re controlled, toward an end.
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 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.
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 -
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 grew up when people seemed actually to be hurting themselves for their art. Of course, some of it was phony.
BARRY HANNAH -
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 -
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 -
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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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 -
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






