Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you… they’re a little away from you.
BARRY HANNAHI 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.
More Barry Hannah Quotes
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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?
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 -
I grew up when people seemed actually to be hurting themselves for their art. Of course, some of it was phony.
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 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 -
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 -
I found out about reviews early on. They’re mostly written by sad men on bad afternoons. That’s probably why I’m less angry than some writers, who are so narcissistic they consider every line of every review, even a thoughtful one, as major treason.
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 -
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 -
Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.
BARRY HANNAH -
I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.
BARRY HANNAH -
What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is… We are all overbrained and overemotioned.
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 -
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 -
I don’t really care about plot; I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way.
BARRY HANNAH






