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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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Barry Hannah
Age: 67 †
Born: 1942
Born: April 23
Died: 2010
Died: March 1
Author
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Meridian
Mississippi
Howard Barry Hannah
Ends
Stories
Scattered
Controlled
Plot
Toward
Language
More quotes by Barry Hannah
If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren't really there.
Barry Hannah
I don't really care about plot I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way.
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 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
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 Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.
Barry Hannah
My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.
Barry Hannah
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
Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you... they're a little away from you.
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 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
A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.
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
You need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy.
Barry Hannah
What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is... We are all overbrained and overemotioned.
Barry Hannah
Professional Southerners sicken me.
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
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
Literature is the history of the soul.
Barry Hannah
When you're not involved, other people's unhappiness seems to be about the funniest damn thing on earth because you think you can solve it, that you are God, that you are above this, and that their unhappiness is just such useless toil and agony. If it's you, it ceases to be a comedy.
Barry Hannah
