Quote

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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Barry Hannah
Age: 67 †
Born: 1942
Born: April 23
Died: 2010
Died: March 1
Author
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Meridian
Mississippi
Howard Barry Hannah
Little
Spell
Spells
Voices
Voice
Comes
Away
Littles
Best
Trance

More quotes by 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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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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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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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
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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
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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
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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 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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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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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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My stories do have plot. They're not just scattered language they're controlled, toward an end.
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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You need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy.
Barry Hannah
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Literature is the history of the soul.
Barry Hannah
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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
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I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.
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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Professional Southerners sicken me.
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