Top 40 Barry Hannah Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Literature is the history of the soul.”

— Barry Hannah

2. “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.”

— Barry Hannah

3. “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

4. “Love and despair go hand in hand.”

— Barry Hannah

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

— Barry Hannah

6. “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

7. “Professional Southerners sicken me.”

— Barry Hannah

8. “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

9. “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?”

— Barry Hannah

10. “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

11. “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

12. “The alcohol had the code and mystery about it as a writer’s drug, but I’m glad that’s been debunked. But the trouble with the drinking, much as I hate to admit it, is it helped the work.”

— Barry Hannah

13. “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

14. “A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.”

— Barry Hannah

15. “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.”

— Barry Hannah

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

— Barry Hannah

17. “In Mississippi it is difficult to achieve a vista.”

— Barry Hannah

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

— Barry Hannah

19. “If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren’t really there.”

— Barry Hannah

20. “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.”

— Barry Hannah

21. “What he was was pretty near invisible, except for the bell of his horn, the all-but-closed eyes, the Arabian nose, the brown hair with its halo of white ends, the desperate oralness, the giant reed punched into his face, and hazy Quadberry, loving the wound in a private dignified ecstasy.”

— Barry Hannah

22. “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

Featured in: Fun Quotes

23. “You’ve got to lie to stay halfway interested in yourself.”

— Barry Hannah

24. “Memory, the whole lying opera of it.”

— Barry Hannah

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

— Barry Hannah

26. “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

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

— Barry Hannah

28. “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.”

— Barry Hannah

29. “I thought I was writing for a fairly hip, intelligent crowd; I just thought there were more of them out there. But they’re not. They’re not out there waiting. They’re not gonna use their intelligence on your book.”

— Barry Hannah

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

— Barry Hannah

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

31. “It came to him, the very picture: he was unshucked oyster, hurtling on the winds, all air, gonad and gut. Chances seemed in a loud hurry around him, but he could do nothing – nothing – about them. Mestre yearned to be driven by some grand circumstance. Everything in his existence was too slack.”

— Barry Hannah

32. “I think women are closer to God than we are. They walk right out there like they know what they’re doing.”

— Barry Hannah

33. “He sifted into Elaine’s, drunk, Southern and insulting, but was ignored.”

— Barry Hannah

34. “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.”

— Barry Hannah

35. “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

36. “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

37. “The first two drinks were always wonderfully liberating. You think better. You’re braver, and you’ll say anything. If you could just hang in there with two or three, it’d be beautiful. The trouble was I couldn’t.”

— Barry Hannah

38. “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.”

— Barry Hannah

39. “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

40. “I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.”

— Barry Hannah

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

— Barry Hannah

42. “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?”

— Barry Hannah

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

— Barry Hannah

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

— Barry Hannah

45. “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.”

— Barry Hannah

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

— Barry Hannah

47. “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

48. “My stories do have plot. They’re not just scattered language; they’re controlled, toward an end.”

— Barry Hannah

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

49. “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