Barry Hannah Quotes

 "Professional Southerners sicken me." ~ Barry Hannah

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

 "My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all." ~ Barry Hannah

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

 "The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl." ~ 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

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

 "You've got to lie to stay halfway interested in yourself." ~ 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 don't really care about plot; I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way." ~ 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

 "Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy." ~ Barry Hannah

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

 "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

 "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

 "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

 "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

 "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 always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience." ~ 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

 "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

 "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

 "A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means." ~ 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

 "Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you... they're a little away from you." ~ 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