Quote

Literature is the history of the soul.

Barry Hannah

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Barry Hannah
Age: 67 †
Born: 1942
Born: April 23
Died: 2010
Died: March 1
Author
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Meridian
Mississippi
Howard Barry Hannah
History
Soul
Literature

More quotes by Barry Hannah

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.
Barry Hannah
Image
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
Image
Love and despair go hand in hand.
Barry Hannah
Image
I don't really care about plot I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way.
Barry Hannah
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
My stories do have plot. They're not just scattered language they're controlled, toward an end.
Barry Hannah
Image
Professional Southerners sicken me.
Barry Hannah
Image
A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.
Barry Hannah
Image
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
Image
Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you... they're a little away from you.
Barry Hannah
Image
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
Image
Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.
Barry Hannah
Image
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
Image
My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.
Barry Hannah
Image
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