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.
BARRY HANNAHYou need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy.
More Barry Hannah Quotes
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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 -
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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If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren’t really there.
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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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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.
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I thought I was writing for a fairly hip, intelligent crowd; I just thought there were more of them out there. But they’re not. They’re not out there waiting. They’re not gonna use their intelligence on your book.
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You need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy.
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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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What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is… We are all overbrained and overemotioned.
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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.
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The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.
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My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.
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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?
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A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.
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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.
BARRY HANNAH