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

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

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

Barry Hannah

my-wife wife inspiration

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

Barry Hannah

away-from-you voice littles

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

Barry Hannah

hurt people art

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

pistols gun stuff

My stories do have plot. They're not just scattered language; they're controlled, toward an end.

Barry Hannah

plot language stories

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

writing believe thinking

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

alcohol hate drinking

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

beautiful two thinking

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

grew-up parent children

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

Barry Hannah

plot care different

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

Barry Hannah

audience light

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

drinking writing love

Love and despair go hand in hand.

Barry Hannah

hand-in-hand despair hands

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

afternoon thoughtful men

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

rabbits night believe

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

agony people thinking

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

feel-good drinking stuff

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

glee clubs long

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

Barry Hannah

chosen jobs mean