Clive Barker Quotes

There are lives lived for love, and lives lived for art. We, happy band, have chosen the later persuasion. ~ Clive Barker

What did it matter, anyway, he thought, whether this was a real place or a dream? It felt real, and that was all that mattered. ~ Clive Barker

I think babies cry when they're born because they're born with the knowledge of all the terrible shit that's gonna happen to them. That's why I never had kids. Every life is a death sentence. We just forget it later in life, like dreams we lose the second we wake up. Whether we worry about it or not, the shit's still going to fly. The important thing is we're here. At least for now. ~ Clive Barker

There were no chambers now along the passageway and consequently no lights. There was a glow up ahead, however - fitful and cold, but bright enough to illuminate both the ground she stumbled over, which was bare earth, and the silvery frost on the walls. ~ Clive Barker

The scent of sweet cherry had attracted hundreds of ants. They were crawling over it and into it, many drowning for their greed. ~ Clive Barker

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. ~ Clive Barker

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 ... ~ Clive Barker

Anyway, it's gone. And there's nothing left in my pocket to charm you. So from now on it's going to have to be tears or nothing I'm afraid.
That's all I've got left to tell you see: tears, tears, tears. ~ 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. ~ Clive Barker

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

Remember, Lucius, that everything you learn is already a part of you, even to the Godhead Itself. Study nothing except in the knowledge that you already knew it. Worship nothing except in adoration of your true self. And fear nothing"--there the Maestro stopped and shuddered, as though he had a presentiment--"fear nothing except in the certainty that you are your enemy's begetter and its only hope of healing. For everything that does evil is in pain. Will you remember those things? ~ Clive Barker

Well, she's lucky. She still has her little dominion here in Coldheart Canyon. ~ Clive Barker

So quickly? Todd cleared away another wave of tears and looked down at the body on the table. Dempsey's eye was still half-open, but it didn't look back at him any longer. Where there'd been a sliver of bright life, where there'd been mischief and shared rituals - where, in short, there'd been Dempsey - there was nothing. ~ Clive Barker

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

You have to taste the sour urine before you break the jug. ~ Clive Barker

Evil, however powerful it seemed, could be undone by its own appetite. ~ Clive Barker

Everywhere, in the wreckage around him, he found evidence to support the same bitter thesis: that he had encountered nothing in his life - no person, no state of mind or body - he wanted sufficiently to suffer even passing discomfort for. ~ Clive Barker

We're too much ourselves. Afraid of letting go of what we are, in case we are nothing, and holding on so tight, we lose everything else. ~ Clive Barker

Wherever I go, I will speak of you with love. ~ Clive Barker

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

Leavening the flat bread of what we know, with the yeast of what we dream may come to pass. ~ Clive Barker

But she felt as though whatever she'd been given in the Devil's Country it was affecting her mind, not her body, and it was not doing anything remotely healing. Quite the reverse. ~ Clive Barker

The places where death comes to take love away, where we lose each other and lose ourselves; that's where the connections begin. It takes a brave soul to look there and not despair."
"I've tried to be brave," she said.
"I know," he said softly. "I know. ~ Clive Barker

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. ~ Clive Barker

I have deeper journeys to take. Metaphysical journeys to see Christ. Shaman journeys. It's what I have been elected by God to do. ~ Clive Barker

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. ~ Clive Barker

Your kind has a superstitious terror of things ugly and broken; you fear that their condition may somehow infect you. ~ Clive Barker

Putting down the devil was the Lord's own sport. ~ Clive Barker

I don't think that the despiritualised, dehumanised culture in which we live, the McDonalds and Disney culture, does our internal lives, our mythological lives, any favours at all. In other words, to be an Outsider in this culture now is to be looking inside at a plastic world, and I think it's easier to critique that world if I don't belong to it ... In Hollywood where I live now, there's a lot of having lunches, a lot of going to parties ... and I will have no part of that. I'm certainly not very good at it, I don't like it and I feel a little weird about it. I don't want to be part of the problem, I want to be a part of the solution, and the only way I can help solve the problem of the plasticity of our world is by writing, by painting and by making my work, so I stay where I can do that, which is at my desk, in my studio. I will venture out when I need to sell a book or exhibit my paintings, but the rest of the time my job is to be here and imagine. ~ Clive Barker

Zombies are the ideal late twentieth-century monsters. A zombie is the one thing you can't deal with. It survives anything. Frankenstein's monster and Dracula could be sent down in so many ways. Zombies, though, fall outside all this. You can't argue with them. They just keep coming at you. ~ Clive Barker

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 ~ Clive Barker

I grew up reading Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Robert McCammon, Isaac Asimov's nonfiction books, and Roald Dahl. ~ Nnedi Okorafor

It was what his mother would have done in the circumstances. Boiled some fresh water, warmed the pot and counted out the spoonfuls of tea. Setting domestic order against the chaos, in the hope of winning some temporary reprieve from the vale of tears. ~ Clive Barker

What worth was a man who could not be haunted? ~ Clive Barker

And this story, having no beginning, will have no end. ~ Clive Barker

It was as though in these last minutes together
when they had so much to say
they could say nothing of the least significance, for fear it open the floodgates. ~ Clive Barker

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? ~ Clive Barker

You'll learn, honey. Love can be the best thing in life. And it can be the worst. The absolute worst. ~ Clive Barker

Here is a list of terrible things,
The jaws of sharks, a vultures wings
The rabid bite of the dogs of war,
The voice of one who went before,
But most of all the mirror's gaze,
Which counts us out our numbered days. ~ Clive Barker

Abaratians are very much about living in the moment; living life because that's what we've got, we've got today, we've got now, we've got being alive now and we have to be awake and alive in the moment and not asleep in our lives. And they would find the idea of sleeping through your life, of being bored - they would think that was very stupid - why would you be bored when there's so much to do and so much to see and so much to be? ~ Clive Barker

Has anyone here ever heard of the Harrowing?" Dale asked, breaking the silence. No one replied. "It was in the time between Christ's crucifixion and his Resurrection," he went on. "The story goes, Christ went down into Hell, walked among the damned, and set many of them free. Then he returned to Earth and broke the bondage of death. It's supposedly the first and only amnesty Hell has ever known. ~ Clive Barker

The true Wonderland was not like that, he knew. It was as much shadow as sunlight, and its mysteries could only be unveiled when your wits were about used up and your mind close to cracking. ~ Clive Barker

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. ~ Clive Barker

I know that I want to bring sex and horror together as I have been able to in my books. ~ Clive Barker

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. ~ Clive Barker

Good horror fiction deals with taboos. It must always go to the limits of what is acceptable. ~ Clive Barker

This was the substance of every moment, she realized: the body - never certain if the next lungful would be its last - hovering for a tiny time between cessation and continuance. And in that space out of time, between a breath expelled and another drawn, the miraculous was easy, because neither flesh nor reason has laid their edicts there. ~ Clive Barker

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. ~ Clive Barker

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 ~ Clive Barker

I begin. I write a draft without ever looking back. Without ever touching what's gone before. Because I think it will be shit, so I daren't look back. I write a draft. I start again. I have the text when I start the second draft and then I do the same thing a third time.
- To Linda L. Richards, The January Interview ~ Clive Barker

I am inevitable. ~ Clive Barker

You're damned if you can't forgive, Jude. ~ Clive Barker

So you can't please all the people all the time. All you can do is what pleases you, and hope that it pleases other people.
I love my readers, and I respect my readers, but I'm not going to simplify or echo myself, copy myself, just so the sales will be better. ~ Clive Barker

I swear, the bigger the bully, the smaller the dick. ~ Clive Barker

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. ~ Clive Barker

His body and his mind went about their different businesses. The former, freed from conscious instruction, breathed, rolled, sweated, and digested. The latter went dreaming. ~ Clive Barker

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. ~ Clive Barker

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. ~ Clive Barker

I found a brief piece of by Antonio Vivaldi around this time which became my 'Pinhead Mood Music'. Called Al Santo Sepolcro (At The Holy Sepulchre), it opens more like a piece of modern orchestral music, and although it it moves toward Vivaldi's familiar harmonies, there is always the threat that it will fall back into dissonance. The piece progresses in an exquisite agony, poised on a knife edge between beauty and disfigurement, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. Perfect. ~ Doug Bradley

The extraordinary's the norm. ~ Clive Barker

We have great cities to visit: New York and Washington, Paris and London; and further east, and older than any of these, the legendary city of Samarkand, whose crumbling palaces and mosques still welcome travelers on the Silk road. Weary of cities? Then we'll take to the wilds. To the islands of Hawaii and the mountains of Japan, to forests where Civil War dead still lie, and stretches of sea no mariner ever crossed. They all have their poetry: the glittering cities and the ruined, the watery wastes and the dusty; I want to show you them all. I want to show you everything. ~ Clive Barker

If we have nothing to do but service our own pleasure - because society has taught us that's all we're worth and we're exiled from positions of authority from which we could actually shape society - then we just become hedonists. Eventually, despite how great it may look on Saturday night, come Monday morning there's just purposelessness. ~ Clive Barker

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. ~ Clive Barker

Witch, do this for me,
Find me a moon
made of longing.
Then cut it sliver thin,
and having cut it,
hang it high
above my beloved's house,
so that she may look up
tonight
and see it,
and seeing it, sigh for me
as I sigh for her,
moon or no moon. ~ Clive Barker

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

What do the good know?' he said. 'Except what the bad teach them by their excesses? ~ Clive Barker

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. ~ Clive Barker

All rising to great place is by a winding stair. - Sir Francis Bacon, ~ Clive Barker

He had certainly set his eyes on more voluptuous creatures , but something about her lack of glamour engaged him. Such women were in his experience often more entertaining company than beauties like Julia. They could be flattered or bullied into acts the beauties would never countenance and be grateful for the attention. ~ Clive Barker

You want my advice!
Kiss the Devil, eat the worm.
Jan de Mooy, Another Matter; or, Man Remade ~ Clive Barker

Books are like people, when they are open they are red ~ Clive Barker

Did I say that she was beautiful? I was wrong. Beauty is too tame a notion; it evokes only faces in magazines. A lovely eloquence, a calming symmetry; none of that describes this woman's face. So perhaps I should assume I cannot do it justice with words. Suffice it to say that it would break your heart to see her; and it would mend what was broken in the same moment; and you would be twice what you'd been before. ~ Clive Barker

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. ~ Clive Barker

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

Muck held the whip hand. ~ Clive Barker

Believe me. Sometimes when life looks to be at its grimmest, there's a light hidden at the heart of things.
Clive Barker, Abarat ~ Cornelia Funke

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

Her streak of independence, which had first brought her to this unfriendly city, was in studied defiance of her smothering appetite for security. If she gave in to those loving appeals she knew she would take root in domestic soil and not look up and out again for another year. In which time, what adventures might have passed her by? ~ Clive Barker

The Devil is by no means the worst that there is; I would rather have dealings with him than with many a human being. He honours his agreements much more promptly than many a swindler on Earth. To be true, when payment is due he comes on the dot; just as twelve strikes, fetches his soul and goes off home to Hell like a good Devil. He's just a businessman as is right and proper. - -J.N. NESTROY, Hollenangst ~ Clive Barker

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

You could sometimes guide people's opinions, but if they didn't want to buy what you had to sell you could shout yourself hoarse trying to make them do it and it would never work. ~ Clive Barker

We are the star and the darkness it peirces ~ Clive Barker

So discretion was the by-word. They would take meant only when the hunger became crippling, and only then victims who were unlikely to be missed. They would refrain from infecting others, so as no to advertise their presence. if one was found, no other would risk exposure by going to his aid. Hard laws o live by, but not as hard as the consequences of breaking them. The rest was patience, and they were well used to that. Their liberator would come eventually, if they could only survive the wait. Few had any clue as to the shape he'd come in. But all knew his name. Cabal, he was called. Who Unmade Midian. Their prayers were full of him. On the next wind, let him come. If not now, then tomorrow. They might not have prayed so passionately had they known what a sea change his coming would bring. They might not have prayed at all had the know they prayed to themselves. But these were revelations for a later day. For now, they had simpler concerns. Keeping the children from the roofs at night, the bereaved from crying out too loud, the young in summer from falling in love with the human. It was a life. ~ Clive Barker

This kind of business (murder) required detachment. The trick was to do it almost casually, as you might flick on the radio, or swat a mosquito. ~ Clive Barker

Handwriting everything, for me, is psychologically useful because it keeps my writing economical. I think there are word processor styles emerging. Something does seem to happen to a writer's style when he works on a word processor. When you hand write a thing the size of Weaveworld (584 pages) you want to make sure every word counts because it's such a huge labour to get it down. ~ Clive Barker

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

There must still be room for the falling note, of course. Even in an undying world there are times when beauty passes from sight, or love passes from the heart, and we feel the sorrow of partition. ~ Clive Barker

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. ~ Clive Barker

Now, I don't believe that a god exists. I think that gods are creation of men, by men, and for men. What has happened over the many centuries now, the better part of two thousand in fact, is that God has been slowly and steadily accruing power. His church has been accruing power, and the men who run that church, and they are all men, are not about to give it up. If they give it up, they give up luxury, they give up comfort. ~ Clive Barker

Keep it simple. Trust your imagination. Discover what is unique about your imagination. Don't simply read a story and copy it.
I go into myself. Then I transcribe what visions I have. If those ideas are original, and you are devoted, you will go far. ~ Clive Barker

When it was all done, Suzanna found her voice, thanking both the grave diggers and their mothers. "After all that digging," said the eldest of the girls, "I just hope he grows." "He will," said her mother, with no trace of indulgence. "They always do." On ~ Clive Barker

My skull was a face that concealed scorpions. ~ Clive Barker

Talk of Power and Might would always attract an audience. Lords never went out of fashion. ~ Clive Barker

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

What we want to believe and what is true are, I think, more closely related than the Rationalists would sometimes have us believe. ~ Clive Barker

I'm an inclusionist. I've always divided up (very, very broadly, I admit) the artistic instincts into the inclusionist and the exclusionist. The exclusionist is Raccine. The inclusionist is Shakespeare. I've always felt like I'd prefer to throw 45 things into the pot and hope that maybe 36 of them will taste good. You may choke on 9 of them. I'd rather do that than only have half that number of elements and each one perfect. That's because I know that people choke on different things.... I think that when I was a kid, the experience of things, the experience of just finding words for things, of finding somebody else's world and being able to leap into it and, like any world, you pick up the geography instantly. You expected the thing to unfold, you expected there to be valleys that upon entering that world you were barely aware of. For me a novel, particularly a large novel, one you put down at the end and think, 'Hell, that was interesting. I'm not sure I understood Chapters X, Y and Z, but maybe next time I read it or talk to someone about it, I will'... that's a very different experience to the immaculately formed, beautifully honed, finished 'art' thing. ~ Clive Barker

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

Well, here he was. They could save each other, the way the poets promised lovers should. He was mystery, he was darkness, he was all she had dreamed of. And if she would only free him he would service her - oh yes - until her pleasure reached that threshold that, like all thresholds, was a place where the strong grew stronger, and the weak perished. Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa. And he knew it well enough to call it home. ~ Clive Barker

There is no such thing as originality. It has all been said before, suffered before. If a person knows that, is it any wonder love becomes mechanical and death just a scene to be shunned? There is no absolute knowledge to be gained from either. Just another ride on the merry-go-round, another blurred scene of faces smiling and faces grieved. ~ Clive Barker

He'd fill every moment with the seasons he'd found in his heart: hopes like birds on a spring branch; happiness like a warm summer sun; magic like the rising mists of autumn. And best of all, love; love enough for a thousand Christmases. ~ Clive Barker