Barry Hannah Quotes & Sayings

I got no idea wht a writer of a book should have respect. Or even get the time of day, unless he's a prophet. It's a sign of our present-day hell. Books, think about it, the writer of a book does envy, sloth, gluttony, lust, larceny, greed or what? Oh, vanity. He don't miss a single one of them. He is a peeping Tom, an onanist, a busybody, and he's faking humility every one of God's minutes. — Barry Hannah

My dad read history, about a book a day, but only after he retired as a successful bank and insurance man. — 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

My stories do have plot. They're not just scattered language; they're controlled, toward an end. — Barry Hannah

There was no one, when I was in school, who talked about going in and blowing up students. The teachers were very stern and hateable, but nobody ever mentioned murder. — 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

My aunts told wonderful stories. Not to me, but to each other. We had a very strong family. My mother's sisters loved each other intensely. The uncles loved each other intensely. — Barry Hannah

Literature is the history of the soul. — Barry Hannah

I hate editing. I love to write, but I hate to reread my stuff. To revise. — Barry Hannah

Ring!" he shrieked at the vapid instrument. — Barry Hannah

I don't really care about plot; I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way. — Barry Hannah

I wake my wife up at 3 a.m. and say, "Listen to this!" — 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

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 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

Unable to swim, he had maneuvered to fall off an old-timers' party yacht in the Hudson River. His departure was not remarked by the revelers. They motored on toward the Atlantic and he bobbed around in the wash. He couldn't swim. But he did. He learned how. Before he knew it, he was making time and nearing the dock where a small Italian liner sat dead still, white, three stories high. Nobody was around when he pulled up on a stray rope on the wharf and walked erect to the street, where cars were flashing. Day after tomorrow was his seventieth birthday. What a past, he said. I've survived. Further, I'm horny and vindictive. Does the fire never stop? — Barry Hannah

I had absolute freedom to create things on my own and in silence. No rush, the artificial rush by media. Certainly no rush to grow up. We had plenty of boyhood, plenty of girlhood. — Barry Hannah

...nightly rolling of Mother Ocean ("It's all right, it's all right; everything is calm; we are just eating every thing that moves in here, dry people")..."p.57 — 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

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

Many robins got in the church from the trees and roosted among the congregation. They were drunk from some berries and fallen persimmons. Come into the mead hall out of the chill. In Viking history, once a Christian described human life as the flight of a bird through the mead hall. The outerness afterward, eternity. — 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

You need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy. — Barry Hannah

A man's got to do what a man's got to do. A woman must do what he can't. — Barry Hannah

If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren't really there. — Barry Hannah

What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is ... We are all overbrained and overemotioned. — Barry Hannah

She had shared his sheets, and, in nightmares of remorse, he had shared her body, waking with drastic regret, feeling as soiled and soilsome as the city itself. — 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

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 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 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

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

Whoever you are, be that person with all your might. Time goes by faster than we thought. It is a thief so quiet. You must let yourself be loved and you must love, parts of you that never loved must open and love. You must announce yourself in all particulars so you can have yourself. — Barry Hannah

I think women are closer to God than we are. They walk right out there like they know what they're doing. — Barry Hannah

I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience. — Barry Hannah

I looked over the despondency of the home crowd. Fools! Fools! I thought. Love it! Love the loss as well as the gain. Go home and dig it. Nobody was killed. We saw victory and defeat, and they were both wonderful. — 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 lost my second marriage because of drinking, and I loved the woman very much. But I thought I needed booze to write. I'm glad I was disabused. — 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

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'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 Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl. — 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

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. — 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 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

Love and despair go hand in hand. — Barry Hannah

I don't go around thinking about regret; regret doesn't consume me as a person ... I'm not certain about whether any writer, any artist, any musician, can write without regret, so I don't think perhaps it's even particularly Southern. — 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 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. — Barry Hannah

I was born in Clinton, Mississippi, which had 1,500-2,500 people when I was growing up - a village. — 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

My sense of the past is vivid and slow. I hear every sign and see every shadow. — Barry Hannah

I wouldn't be happy had I only been a teacher, if all I had done was help young people, frankly. I don't get nearly the joy teaching as I do out of creation. — Barry Hannah

A writer's job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means. — Barry Hannah

My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all. — 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

Honestly, I envy painters, who can have a masterpiece in one morning. Or musicians, who can write something in 30 minutes and arrange it in an hour, sometimes. 'Cause with this, with writing, you can occasionally feel like a caveman, like you've been working with pitch and tar on this brush. — Barry Hannah

You've got to lie to stay halfway interested in yourself. — Barry Hannah