Barry Hannah

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

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

My aunts told wonderful stories. Not to me, but to each other. We had a very strong family. My mother's sisters loved each other intensely. The uncles loved each other intensely.

When I have to compete with John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Louie Armstrong on iTunes, which I'm doing now, that's a problem. That means that jazz is not being heard by younger audiences.

Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects, and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of colour. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.'

My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.