Barry Hannah Quotes

Unable to swim, he had maneuvered to fall off an old-timers' party yacht in the Hudson River. His departure was not remarked by the revelers. They motored on toward the Atlantic and he bobbed around in the wash. He couldn't swim. But he did. He learned how. Before he knew it, he was making time and nearing the dock where a small Italian liner sat dead still, white, three stories high. Nobody was around when he pulled up on a stray rope on the wharf and walked erect to the street, where cars were flashing. Day after tomorrow was his seventieth birthday. What a past, he said. I've survived. Further, I'm horny and vindictive. Does the fire never stop?

...it's always your first attempt every time you write, with your only companions being fear and coffee. That's the way it is a lot of times. You have fear and coffee, and that's it.

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.

A writer's job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.

She had shared his sheets, and, in nightmares of remorse, he had shared her body, waking with drastic regret, feeling as soiled and soilsome as the city itself.

I got no idea wht a writer of a book should have respect. Or even get the time of day, unless he's a prophet. It's a sign of our present-day hell. Books, think about it, the writer of a book does envy, sloth, gluttony, lust, larceny, greed or what? Oh, vanity. He don't miss a single one of them. He is a peeping Tom, an onanist, a busybody, and he's faking humility every one of God's minutes.

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

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.

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.

I wake my wife up at 3 a.m. and say, "Listen to this!"

Honestly, I envy painters, who can have a masterpiece in one morning. Or musicians, who can write something in 30 minutes and arrange it in an hour, sometimes. 'Cause with this, with writing, you can occasionally feel like a caveman, like you've been working with pitch and tar on this brush.

I never pulled a loaded pistol on anybody, but it got around that I did. It got turned into lore. It's a myth. There's so much bad gun stuff.

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.

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.

Marriage was a good cause, thought Ross. On a given day chances were one of you might be human.

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.

In Mississippi it is difficult to achieve a vista.

Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you ... they're a little away from you.

Love and despair go hand in hand.

When you read and wonder, for six seconds, about the random pointless violence of these days, then are blissful it was not you, having, really, a better day, stop and think: Could not these felons be, really, God's children loose, adept, so hungry and correct in our world?

Memory, the whole lying opera of it, is killing me now.

My sense of the past is vivid and slow. I hear every sign and see every shadow.

Many robins got in the church from the trees and roosted among the congregation. They were drunk from some berries and fallen persimmons. Come into the mead hall out of the chill. In Viking history, once a Christian described human life as the flight of a bird through the mead hall. The outerness afterward, eternity.

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?

A man has to sleep with as many animals as possible, Ulrich blurted. But not in the sexual way. By no means. An execration. No. Just get in the bed there with them, invite them on in, know their smell and their cold nose.
You smell the good dirt in their fur. Fur is individual. No two alike, like a snowflake. It ought to be a state law.
The others listened, but he was through and at peace.

...she found Robinson among the hundreds of New Yorkers who managed to make a great amount of money for doing almost nothing at all but was pretty as god and possessed of a voice like a French horn, so that at crucial parties he could say practically nothing and leave the impression among the more musically eared that profundity of the eternal sort had passed near.

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.

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

I don't really believe in a creative-writing major as an undergraduate. It's a bad idea, terrible. I've met creative-writing majors from other places and they don't know a goddamn thing. They're the worst students. They just think they're good because they could pass.

I grew up when people seemed actually to be hurting themselves for their art. Of course, some of it was phony.

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.

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

Ring!" he shrieked at the vapid instrument.

...nightly rolling of Mother Ocean ("It's all right, it's all right; everything is calm; we are just eating every thing that moves in here, dry people")..."p.57

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 go around thinking about regret; regret doesn't consume me as a person ... I'm not certain about whether any writer, any artist, any musician, can write without regret, so I don't think perhaps it's even particularly Southern.

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

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.

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.

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 looked over the despondency of the home crowd. Fools! Fools! I thought. Love it! Love the loss as well as the gain. Go home and dig it. Nobody was killed. We saw victory and defeat, and they were both wonderful.

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.

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.

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.