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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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Barry Hannah
Age: 67 †
Born: 1942
Born: April 23
Died: 2010
Died: March 1
Author
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Meridian
Mississippi
Howard Barry Hannah
First
Drink
Always
Trouble
Think
Three
Braver
Thinking
Beautiful
Wonderfully
Two
Drinks
Anything
Liberating
Better
Hang
Firsts
Couldn

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I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.
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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.
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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.
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Literature is the history of the soul.
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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.
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My stories do have plot. They're not just scattered language they're controlled, toward an end.
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You need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy.
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I don't really care about plot I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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Love and despair go hand in hand.
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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Professional Southerners sicken me.
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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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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My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.
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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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