Barry Hannah Quotes

The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.

Awakening your spiritual side is really what artists do. When you hit a groove, it's not you; it's the spirit world.

One's mind has a way of making itself up in the background, and it suddenly becomes clear what one means to do.

Actually, actually, when he first put us into hypnosis, he didn't know what he was going to get.

My best work is often almost unconscious and occurs ahead of my ability to understand it.

It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.

I don't do my best work while I'm in therapy. I'm too onto myself immediately seeing meanings in things and more likely to censor myself. I'd rather find images I don't understand. That's what generates the work.

We are all at times unconscious prophets.

I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.

Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.

Art is nothing but the expression of our dream; the more we surrender to it the closer we get to the inner truth of things, our dream-life, the true life that scorns questions and does not see them.

I have often had apparitions of hosts of serpents with heads at their tails, but not one was able to bite me; and many other visions.

It is the mystery of the creative act that something other than our conscious self takes over.

The best books come from someplace inside. You don't write because you want to, but because you have to.

When I write a poem, I go into a state of self-forgetfulness, and something higher takes over; I like to call it my best self.

My silver cord - the link between my body and my spirit - was extremely sensitive. It was what allowed me to sense dreamscapes at a distance. It could also snap me back into my skin.

My dreams are of water. And my nightmares.

The only real valuable thing is intuition.

I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious.

The writing that feels the best to me, I experience sometimes, is a kind of weirdly deep listening - like, it feels like if you just listen hard enough, the next sentence will tell you what it needs to be.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

I don't know if you can articulate an instinct.

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

My best songs come from a place outside myself.

I haven't hypnotised a whole lot of celebrities, because they're fearful of it.