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I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.

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
Audience
American
Light
Always
Misjudged
Intended
Open

More quotes by 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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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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The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.
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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 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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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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You need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy.
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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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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I don't really care about plot I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way.
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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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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My stories do have plot. They're not just scattered language they're controlled, toward an end.
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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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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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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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 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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Professional Southerners sicken me.
Barry Hannah