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

More quotes by 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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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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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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If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren't really there.
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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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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What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is... We are all overbrained and overemotioned.
Barry Hannah
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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
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My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.
Barry Hannah
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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
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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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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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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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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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Love and despair go hand in hand.
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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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 always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.
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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Professional Southerners sicken me.
Barry Hannah