I don’t really care about plot; I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way.
BARRY HANNAHYou need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy.
More Barry Hannah Quotes
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I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.
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The alcohol had the code and mystery about it as a writer’s drug, but I’m glad that’s been debunked. But the trouble with the drinking, much as I hate to admit it, is it helped the work.
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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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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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I wake my wife up at 3 a.m. and say, “Listen to this!”
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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.
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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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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.
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My stories do have plot. They’re not just scattered language; they’re controlled, toward an end.
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I wanted very much to be Miles Davis when I was a boy, but without the practice. It just looked like an endless road.
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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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You need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
BARRY HANNAH