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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

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Barry Hannah
Age: 67 †
Born: 1942
Born: April 23
Died: 2010
Died: March 1
Author
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Meridian
Mississippi
Howard Barry Hannah
Writing
Second
Much
Needed
Love
Loved
Age
Woman
Booze
Lost
Glad
Write
Drinking
Thought
Marriage

More quotes by Barry Hannah

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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
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The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.
Barry Hannah
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My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.
Barry Hannah
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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
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What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is... We are all overbrained and overemotioned.
Barry Hannah
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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
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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
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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
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Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you... they're a little away from you.
Barry Hannah
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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
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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
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If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren't really there.
Barry Hannah
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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
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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
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Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.
Barry Hannah
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Literature is the history of the soul.
Barry Hannah
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You need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy.
Barry Hannah
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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
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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
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A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.
Barry Hannah