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

Categorized in : Thinking Two Writing

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

soul dog heart

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.

Barry Hannah

thieves and-love love-you

Professional Southerners sicken me.

Barry Hannah

southerner

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

too-much done writing

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

Barry Hannah

wretched howl might

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

Barry Hannah

hell joy needs

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

gratitude writing believe

Literature is the history of the soul.

Barry Hannah

soul literature

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

Barry Hannah

bogs labyrinth essence

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

Barry Hannah

narrative pain joy

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

motorcycle writing country

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

jumping writing fun

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

Barry Hannah

able suffering men

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

albums musician writing

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

genes my-family hate

There was no one, when I was in school, who talked about going in and blowing up students. The teachers were very stern and hateable, but nobody ever mentioned murder.

Barry Hannah

students teacher school

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

Barry Hannah

concern form stories

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.

Barry Hannah

flaws kind writing

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

joy character long

I wanted very much to be Miles Davis when I was a boy, but without the practice. It just looked like an endless road.

Barry Hannah

endless practice boys