Barry Hannah Quotes

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.

Professional Southerners sicken me.

Literature is the history of the soul.

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.

What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is... We are all overbrained and overemotioned.

Most novels I come across have all the excitement of a long trip on a bus with a sensitive glee club. Yammer and chat.

The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.

My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.

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.

You need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy.

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.

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.

If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren't really there.

You've got to lie to stay halfway interested in yourself.

Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.

I was always kind of florid. And full of rhetoric. That was my flaw. My whole time writing, I've had to work against that because it can be a wrecking posture.

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.

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.

I don't really care about plot; I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way.

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.

My stories do have plot. They're not just scattered language; they're controlled, toward an end.

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.

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.

I found out about reviews early on. They're mostly written by sad men on bad afternoons. That's probably why I'm less angry than some writers, who are so narcissistic they consider every line of every review, even a thoughtful one, as major treason.

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.