Barry Hannah Quotes

32 quotes in 500 categories

• 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…
• If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren't really there.
• Literature is the history of the soul.
• You need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy.
• The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.
• Professional Southerners sicken me.
• I wake my wife up at 3 a.m. and say, "Listen to this!"
• 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…
• Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you... they're a little away from you.
• I grew up when people seemed actually to be hurting themselves for their art. Of course, some of it was phony.
• I wanted very much to be Miles Davis when I was a boy, but without the practice. It just looked like an endless road.
• Love and despair go hand in hand.
• Most novels I come across have all the excitement of a long trip on a bus with a sensitive glee club. Yammer and chat.
• My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.
• Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.
• 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 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…
• 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,…
• 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…
• 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,…

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