Barry Hannah famous quotes

03-25-2025

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

#Dog #Heart #Soul
Professional Southerners sicken me.
-- Barry Hannah

#Southerner
Literature is the history of the soul.
-- Barry Hannah

#Soul #Literature
What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is... We are all overbrained and overemotioned.
-- Barry Hannah

#Essence #Labyrinth #Bogs
I grew up when people seemed actually to be hurting themselves for their art. Of course, some of it was phony.
-- Barry Hannah

#Art #Hurt #People
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

#Boys #Practice #Miles
Love and despair go hand in hand.
-- Barry Hannah

#Hands #Despair
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

#Long #Clubs #Glee
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

#Gratitude #Believe #Writing
You've got to lie to stay halfway interested in yourself.
-- Barry Hannah

#Lying #Halfway
A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.
-- Barry Hannah

#Jobs #Mean #Chosen
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

#Character #Long #Joy
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

#Men #Thoughtful #Narcissistic
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

#Writing #Kind #Flaws
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

#Fun #Writing #Jumping
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

#Writing #Thinking #Two
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

#Thinking #Agony #People
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

#Love You #And Love #Thieves
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 youâ€™re better than the rabbits we ate last night.
-- Barry Hannah

#Believe #Night #Machines
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

#Country #Writing #Motorcycle
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

#Writing #Done #Too Much
Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.
-- Barry Hannah

#Pain #Joy #Narrative
My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.
-- Barry Hannah

#Stories #Form #Concern
If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren't really there.
-- Barry Hannah

#Men #Suffering #Able
You need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy.
-- Barry Hannah

#Joy #Needs #Hell
The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.
-- Barry Hannah

#Might #Howl
Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you... they're a little away from you.
-- Barry Hannah

#Voice #Littles #Away From You
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

#Love #Drinking #Writing
I wake my wife up at 3 a.m. and say, "Listen to this!"
-- Barry Hannah

#Inspiration #Wife #My Wife

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