Barry Hannah Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

As a young man it was very disturbing to teach beautiful girls because it was lust, and putting on a show, peacocking. But you just calm out if you're around sixty—most of us, anyway. Now I feel like an uncle to the young beauties I teach. So I've learned more about women, let's say, in the last decade by the normal process of aging and mellowing.

Barry Hannah
My stories do have plot. They're not just scattered language; they're controlled, toward an end. I do love storytelling. I start out in a very plain, old-fashioned way. I'm obviously not connecting with the thousands of people I thought were out there. Maybe because I grew up with smart peers, people up on music, science, the world. I grew up with some smart damn people, and that might have hindered me as a writer. You had to be quick.

Barry Hannah
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
Literature was the first time I was happy to know things I was supposed to know, the first time my spirit caught up with something. You could be as wild as you want and say what you want and have respect and honor for it, which I thought was a pretty good deal.

Barry Hannah
There have been times in my life when I could not keep up with my pencil, my pen. The stories were just coming so thick and heavy. Lately, it's been a calmer, more meditative act when I write.

Barry Hannah
Everything's a failure, when you compare it to music.

Barry Hannah
Frankly, I'm such a veteran of criticism I skim the bad reviews and the good ones. Unless it's a person I know or who's intelligent and I've read before, I don't listen that much—to either the praise or the blame and the attacks.

Barry Hannah
Many of us have been writers since we were ten because we've been hams in one way or another. We want our times dramatized. We don't want to be erased by time, and I think that's what it's all about. I think everything's a monument, every piece of work we do, to a past. And that's the story. That's the plot.

Barry Hannah
Modern writers of history are so far superior to fiction writers lately that the domestic psychologies we're supposed to wade through that pass for art are only high dreariness. I get much from the courage of men and women in history. History is story, of course, and good history will invest you.

Barry Hannah
Probably what we're nostalgic for is an intensity we felt as children that we can never have again. Houses were bigger, people were bigger, women were bigger. Civilization was larger and more intense.

Barry Hannah
I think people may be unaware of how interesting they or their friends or their family are. So as much as possible, I use life itself because I'm more and more convinced that a subject matter of quality is what gives you words.

Barry Hannah
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.

Barry Hannah
I'm putting more women in my work now that I know them better. Getting older you have a better perspective on women because you're not trying to get them all in bed.

Barry Hannah
Miserable novels bore me. I don't want to read a miserable book about misery. I do tend toward a tragicomic view, which is, I guess, a modern mind-set—that things can have the capacity for huge comedy and awful pathos at the same time.

Barry Hannah
I don't think many of us can tell whole tales until we're older. Usually we don't have enough time, and our lives are fairly chopped up. Causality and plot have not revealed themselves yet. Time is what makes good stories.

Barry Hannah
Poetry, for a young person, is natural. It's short and doesn't take a long attention span. You don't know much, but you can make it travel with images and arrested thought.

Barry Hannah
I had absolute freedom to create things on my own and in silence. No rush, the artificial rush by media.

Barry Hannah
Today, there's no present to people. Nobody wants to listen for very long to anybody talking, except in certain places—in a bar, in a confessional, or maybe a shrink's office. All they say is, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Men don't even tell dirty jokes much anymore.

Barry Hannah
I became interested [in writing] early on because my third-grade teacher would let me write little stories instead of the assignment, and then credit me for them.

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

Barry Hannah