Quotes from Barry Hannah

I hate editing. I love to write, but I hate to reread my stuff. To revise.

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

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.

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?

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

Literature is the history of the soul.

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.

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

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 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 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.

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.

They awarded Jones the money at a ceremony where the white parish trustees whetted each other to death explaining what unprecedented heroes they were—most of the bond, of course, coming from white taxes.

Jones was a marching band fool. He did take the fifteen thousand, used a thousand of it to repaint the exterior of the school building, and sunk the rest of it in new instruments and uniforms for the band.

Jones told them they wouldn't get to wear the new uniforms, wouldn't deserve to wear them, until they came in one morning playing faultlessly. In two months, he had them all considering serious life careers in music. Jones was that good.

He told me, in case I shared the common notion that the old deserved death, it was hardly ever true. He had seen and heard a man recite verbatim five Damon Runyan stories, with beautiful gestures, and be cold dead in thirty minutes.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Literature is the history of the soul.

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.

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