Clive Barker Quotes

After all, where can the glorious, the goofy, and the god-like stand shoulder to shoulder?

( ... ) An amalgam of sexual excess and demonic elegance, as likely to fuck you as tear out your heart.

You only saw the darkness, Tammy. There was another side to her. I think there always is, don't you? There's always some light in the darkness, somewhere.

I dreamed a limitless book,
A book unbound,
Its leaves scattered in fantastic abundance.
On every line there was a new horizon drawn,
New heavens supposed;
New states, new souls.
One of those souls,
Dozing through some imagined afternoon,
Dreamed these words.
And needing a hand to set them down,
Made mine.

Meaning is always a latecomer. Beauty and music seduce us first; later ashamed of our own sensuality, we insist on meaning.

By and large I think art is made by people who have discipline married to talent in sufficiently large amounts to work even if they don't feel like it. Anybody can get maudlin and decide to write poetry at 11 at night; the question is, can you do it at 8:30 on a Monday morning..?

For a writer, and particularly a writer of my genre, which is the fantastical, I think that it's to my advantage to feel remote from and disconnected from the world of deal making.

Academe was one of the last strongholds of the professional time-waster.

I am inevitable.

Who can call a man dead whose words still hush and whose sentiments move?

Always, worlds within worlds.

Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise. Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for something to quench its heat, and the mellowest of autumns will tire of gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its fruitfulness. Even winter - the hardest season, the most implacable - dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.

... there's nothing in the world more fun than doing something you're good at.

I love meeting people who've read my books. The prime reason to be on the planet is to make things I can show to other people: paintings, books, movies.

I don't like crowds of any kind. A dinner party of more than six people is not, for me, a pleasure. I get less social as I get older ... I am very resistant to anything that keeps me away from the business of making these journeys into the fantastique. They are my reason for being on the planet, as far as I can comprehend, and I pursue them to the cost of almost anything.

And in time it will be as though men had never come to this perfect corner of the world - never called it paradise on earth, never despoiled it with their dream factories; and in the golden hush of the afternoon all that will be heard will be the flittering of dragonflies, and the murmur of hummingbirds as they pass from bower to bower, looking for a place to sup sweetness.

He was to be their page, their book, the vessel for their autobiographies. A book of blood. A book made of blood. A book written in blood.

I've dealt with a lot of producers who were pricks and I'm determined not to be that.

He was to be used to record their testaments. He was to be their page, their book, the vessel for their autobiographies. A book of blood. A book made of blood. A book written in blood. She thought of the grimoires that had been made of dead human skin: she'd seen them, touched them. She thought of the tattoos she'd seen: freak show exhibits some of them, others just shirtless laborers in the street with a message to their mothers pricked across their backs. It was not unknown, to write a book of blood.

All the great powers in the world are blood-suckers and soul-stealers at heart.

There is no delight the equal of dread

As to my mouth, of all my features, I wish I could possess my mouth again, just as it had been before the fire. I had my mother's lips, generous below and above; and what kissing I had practiced, mainly on my hand or on a lonely pig, had convinced me that my lips would be the source of my good fortune. I would kiss with them, and lie with them, I would make victims and willing slaves of anyone my eyes desired, simply by talking a little, and following the talk with kisses, and the kisses with demands. And they'd melt into compliance, everyone of them, happy to perform the most demeaning acts as long as I was there to reward them with a long, tongue-tied kiss when they were done. But the fire didn't spare my lips; it took them too, erasing them utterly.

Born from different parents, they were siblings in death, destroyed by the same hand.

That's not fair!"
"Life's not fair, Kaspar. You know that. You had a slave for - how long?"
"Twelve years."
"Did you treat him 'fairly'? No, of course not. You beat him when you were in a bad mood, because it made you feel better, and when you felt better you beat him some more.

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He wouldn't be remembered well.

I keep a bedside journal. I am very affected by dream information. They might be scary to other people, but they're mine, so they don't feel scary. I'd wake up in a cold sweat if I didn't dream these things ...

O little one,
My little one,
Come with me,
Your life is done.
Forget the future,
Forget the past.
Life is over:
Breathe your last.

Dorothea: "What the fuck are you?"
Nix: "A man who wanted to be a God ... then changed his mind.

I've always thought that the most extraordinary special effect you could do is to buy a child at the moment of its birth, sit it on a little chair and say, "You'll have three score years and ten," and take a photograph every minute. "And we'll watch you and photograph you for ten years after you die, then we'll run the film." Wouldn't that be extraordinary? We'd watch this thing get bigger and bigger, and flower to become extraordinary and beautiful, then watch it crumble, decay, and rot.

That which is imagined need never be lost.

When, finally, she did sleep, it was the slumber of a watcher and waiter. Light, and full of sighs.

There was no harm done; and what would a Resurrection be without a few laughs?

Are you ready for the apocalypse?

Magic is the first and last religion of the world. It has the power to make us whole, to open our eyes to the Dominions and return us to ourselves. Everything that isn't us is also ourselves. We're joined to everything that was, is and will be. From one end of the Imajica to another. From the tiniest mote dancing over this flame to the Godhead Itself.

Harvey wasn't interested in the clothes, it was the masks that mesmerized him. They were like snowflakes: no two alike. Some were made of wood and of plastic; some of straw and cloth and papier-mâché. Some were as bright as parrots, others as pale as parchment. Some were so grotesque he was certain they'd been carved by crazy people; others so perfect they looked like the death masks of angels. There were masks of clowns and foxes, masks like skulls decorated with real teeth, and one with carved flames instead of hair.

I dreamed I spoke in another's language,
I dreamed I lived in another's skin,
I dreamed I was my own beloved,
I dreamed I was a tiger's kin.
I dreamed that Eden lived inside me,
And when I breathed a garden came,
I dreamed I knew all of Creation,
I dreamed I knew the Creator's name.
I dreamed
and this dream was the finest
That all I dreamed was real and true,
And we would live in joy forever,
You in me, and me in you.

Look at him." The Autarch glanced back at the captive as he spoke. He's got seconds left to live. But the leech gave him a taste and he wants it back again."
"A taste of what?"
"Of the womb, Rosengarten. He said it was like being in the womb. We're all cast out. Whatever we build, wherever we hide, we're cast out.

Though I respect hugely the effort and the care and the beauty of games, I want to be working with people who want to create the 'War & Peace' of games, the 'Citizen Kane' of games, and not just be warming up George Romero.

Books should make somebody look at how they feel, be honest with themselves.

I've spent my creative life so far first in the theatre, then on the page, then on the screen, examining what is turning out as I grow older to look like one enormous landscape.

What I originally thought were different worlds turn out to be one interconnected place. And like a bedspread viewed by a sick child from his pillow, I am very aware that there are colours in various corners which I know very well, but I haven't yet found the ways to get from the blue to the green and from the green to the red.

I've just begun, and I suppose that's become my preoccupation – the idea that at one point I will see it clearly.

Ricky tasted something he hadn't experienced since childhood: the panic of losing the hand of a guardian. In this case the lost parent was his sanity. Somewhere

A monster lies in wait in me,
A stew of wounds and misery,
But fiercer still in life and limb,
The me that lies in wait in him.

Her skin was flawless and always cool, always pale; her body was long, like her hair, like her fingers, like her laughter; and her eyes, oh, her eyes, had every season of leaf in them: the twin greens of spring and high summer, the golds of autumn, and, in her rages, black midwinter rot.

Can you hear me, Todd? There's an ambulance on its way." For a moment his eyes opened a little wider, and he seemed to be making an effort to concentrate on the face in front of him. "It's Maxine," she said. "Remember me?

- when the sun goes out and there's only night, we'll live on the earth. It'll be ours.

Flesh could not keep its glamour, nor eyes their sheen. They would go to nothing soon. But monsters are forever.

Whatever you do, don't look back.

As for theatre, there's ups and downs to everything. Theatre is ephemeral. But that is part of its charm because you can always say the production was better than it was.

My skull was a face that concealed scorpions.

Why? What is his intention? Have you at least discovered that?" "The same as ours, we think," Felixson said. "The getting and keeping of power. He hasn't just taken our treaties, scrolls, and grimoires. He's cleared out all the vestments, all the talismans, all the amulets - " "Hush," Ragowski said suddenly. "Listen." There was a silence among them for a moment, and then a funereal bell chimed softly in the distance. "Oh Christ," Lili said. "It's his bell." The dead man laughed. "He's found you.

But I think humans are innately religious as a species, so you don't need a specific excuse for examining the perversely unholy.

Lost in the wasteland, Ashbery was found by a light flickering up from between the fractured paving stones. Its beams were bitterly cold, and sticky in a way light had no right to be, adhering to his sleeve and hand before fading away. Intrigued, he tracked its source from one eruption to another, each point brighter than the one before.

Nothing's perfect... because time passes... and the beetle and the worm find their way into everything sooner or later.

All had this in common: that if they returned from the Empty Quarter - even though their journey might have taken them only a day's ride into that place - they came back changed men. Nobody could set his eyes on such a void and return to hearth and home without having lost a part of himself to the wilderness forever. Many, having endured the void once, went back, and back again, as if daring the desert to claim them; not content until it did. And those unhappy few who died at home, died with their eyes not on the loving faces at their bedside, nor on the cherry tree in blossom outside the window, but on that waste that called them as only the Abyss can call, promising the soul the balm of nothingness.

To you who have never died, may I say: Welcome to the world!

Being with people makes me vomit. I don't like em. I never did.

He'd never seen such a look on any human face: such a wilderness of innocent malice. A

Hich should teach you something about this world. That it's a place where whatever you work for and care about is bound to be taken away from you sooner or later, and there isn't a thing you can do about it.

There was little comfort, this voice inside him said, in discovering a mystery at the wellspring of his life so banal his unremarkable mind could readily fathom it. Better, perhaps, to die in doubt, knowing there was some revelation still unfound, than to pursue and possess such a wretched certainty.

All Darkness was one darkness in the end. Of heart or Heavens, one Darkness.

I will say it one last time: Demonation! The feeling of it! There are no words -how can there be?- to describe what it feels like to become words, to feel your life encoded, and laid out in black ink on white paper. All my love and hatred, melted into words. It was like the End of the World.

She had opened a door ... and now she was walking with demons. And at the end of her travels, she would have her revenge ... Pain had made a sadist of her.

Fear is a place where you just tell the truth

The World. Hugo had once told Nathaniel in Will's presence, was made by many men, but shaped by few. The important thing was to be one of those few; to find a place in which you could change the repetitive patterns of the many Through political influence and intellectual discourse, and failing either of these , through benign coercion.

To call you excrement would be an insult to the product of my bowels.

He is not angry now; knives are not angry. He is not tearful now; knives are not tearful. He is simply sharp and keen and inevitable.

Give me B movies or give me death!

He spent three months in a wash of depression and self-pity that bordered the suicidal. But even that solution was denied him by his new found nihilism. If nothing was worth living for it followed , didn't it , that there was nothing worth dying for either.

All I've ever wanted to do is darken the day and brighten the night.

Life is short
And pleasures few
And holed the ship
And drowned the crew
But o! But o!
How very blue
the sea is.

Darkness always had its part to play. Without it, how would we know when we walked in the light? It's only when its ambitions become too grandiose that it must be opposed, disciplined, sometimes - if necessary - brought down for a time. Then it will rise again, as it must.

Not a classic reunion. The lover, on seeing his beloved, throws up down his shirt. But then, nothing that happened between Jacqueline and myself was ever quite normal.

Despite his intent, tears sprang to his eyes, and he went into her embrace, both of them sobbing freely, like enemies joined by a common loss or lovers about to be parted. Or else souls who could not remember whether they were lovers or enemies and were weeping at their own confusion.

Especially politics; that was the best trough to wallow in. You could get your snout, eyes, head and front hooves in that mess of muck and have a fine old time splashing around. It was an inexhaustible subject to devour, a swill with a little of everything in it, because everything, according to Judd, was political.

Welcome to the worst nightmare of all, reality!

Pleasure is a reward, given to the human system by evolution in return for services rendered to the preservation and increase of the species.

I never want to be the producer that I too often got.

I want to be remembered as an imaginer, someone who used his imagination as a way to journey beyond the limits of self, beyond the limits of flesh and blood, beyond the limits of even perhaps life itself, in order to discover some sense of order in what appears to be a disordered universe. I'm using my imagination to find meaning, both for myself and, I hope, for my readers.-Clive Barker

It was that sleep itself - the act of closing the eyes and relinquishing control of her consciousness - was something she was temperamentally unsuited to.

Muck held the whip hand.

This was the nadir, surely. They had no further to fall.

They had a leader. Some rebel. Shite! I don't remember his name. You know me and names. He was a dickhead and everybody says so. And old Bitch Tits kicked him down here. He started some rebellion." "Lucifer?" "That's the one. Lucifer. They prayed to Lucifer.

Our lives are scattered throughout with periods of unbelonging; in childhood, of course, and adolescence; but in adulthood too, when sudden loss (or gain) forces us to reassess things we believe immutable.

Perhaps sunlight had always been luminous, and doorways signs of greater passage than that of one room to another. But she'd not noticed it until now.

Funny that. We live in islands of Hours and we never seem to have time enough for anything ...

They're not in the gutter because they had visions, Gentle," Clem said. "They're there because they've been abused, or they've abused themselves." "Which means they can't cover their despair the way the rest can. They've got no distractions from their pain. So they get drunk and crazy, and the next day they're even more lost than they were the day before. But I'd still rather trust them than all the bishops and the ministers. Maybe they're naked, but isn't that a holy state?

I decided that I would do my best to be the worst thing Hell ever vomited forth.

Writing a book is like masturbation, and making a movie is like an orgy.

No passion, only sudden lust, and just as sudden indifference.

But as his years advanced Lewis had seen less and less purpose in distinguishing between fact and fiction.

We cry for ourselves, don't we? Not for the dead. The dead are past caring.

It feels like I've died," he said to Caz when he'd finished.
"Well, you didn't."
"And I should be grateful, right?"
"Right."
"Well, I'm not.

She slipped away unseen, like a shadow's shadow.

What did I see? It's no use telling you there are no words. Of course there are words; there are always words. The question is: can I wield them well enough to evoke the power of what I witnessed? That I doubt. But let me do my best.

Of such divine neglect was atheism made; belief could not be rekindled now, however profound his terror. Thoughts

The century's getting old and stale; it needs new tribes.

There's a lot of art and comics and movies being paid homage to by game designers.

So many masks. Was she the only one who had no secret life, no other self in marrow or mind?

Wherever I go, I will speak of you with love.

You think I'm finished, so you're leaving me to be crucified by every piece of shit journalist in the fucking country.