"Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you... they're a little away from you."
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Quote collection
Barry Hannah quotes (page 1 of 3)
42 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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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"Professional Southerners sicken me."
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"Literature is the history of the soul."
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"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."
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"What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is... We are all overbrained and overemotioned."
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"You need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy."
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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."
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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."
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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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"If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren't really there."
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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."
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"The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl."
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"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."
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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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"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."
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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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"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."
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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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"My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all."
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