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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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Barry Hannah
Age: 67 †
Born: 1942
Born: April 23
Died: 2010
Died: March 1
Author
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Meridian
Mississippi
Howard Barry Hannah
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Mean
Thing
Chosen
Destroy
Writers
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More quotes by Barry Hannah
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
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
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
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
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
If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren't really there.
Barry Hannah
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
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
Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.
Barry Hannah
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
Literature is the history of the soul.
Barry Hannah
You need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy.
Barry Hannah
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
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
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
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
My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.
Barry Hannah
Love and despair go hand in hand.
Barry Hannah
My stories do have plot. They're not just scattered language they're controlled, toward an end.
Barry Hannah
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
