Clive Barker > Quotes

“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.”
― Clive Barker, Days of Magic, Nights of War

“any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”
― Clive Barker, Days of Magic, Nights of War

“After a battle lasting many ages,
The Devil won,
And said to God
(who had been his Maker):
Lord,
We are about to witness the unmaking of Creation
By my hand.
I would not wish you
to think me cruel,
So I beg you, take three things
From this world before I destroy it.
Three things, and then the rest will be
wiped away.'

God thought for a little time.
And at last He said:
No, there is nothing.'
The Devil was surprised.
Not even you, Lord?' he said.
And God said:
No. Not even me.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

“[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.”
― 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, Imajica

“Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood 1-3

“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, Galilee

“It’s only when you’ve lost someone that you realize the nonsense of that
phrase “It’s a small world”. It isn’t. It’s a vast, devouring world, especially if you’re alone.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood 2

“Fuck Heaven. I haven't gotten Earth sorted out yet.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica

“To call you excrement would be an insult to the product of my bowels.”
― Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone

“That which is imagined can never be lost.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“No tears, please. It's a waste of good suffering.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Nothing ever begins.
There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any story springs.
The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator's voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“A man kills the thing he loves, and he must die a little himself.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica

“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, Days of Magic, Nights of War

“I've learned two things in my life. One that love is the beginning and end of all meaning. And two that it is the same thing whatever shape our souls have taken on this journey. Love is love. Is love. ”
― Clive Barker

“Writing about the unholy is one way of writing about what is sacred. ”
― Clive Barker

“Nothing happens carelessly. We’re not brought into the world without reason, even though we may never understand the reason. An infant that lives an hour, that dies before it can lay eyes on those who made it, even that soul did not live without purpose: this is my sudden certainty.”
― Clive Barker, Galilee

“You cut up a thing that's alive and beautiful to find out how it's alive and why it's beautiful, and before you know it, it's neither of those things, and you're standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it.”
― Clive Barker

“We are all our own graveyards, I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.”
― Clive Barker

“Is there any good news?' Tesla said.
Who ever promised that? Who ever said there'd be good news?”
― Clive Barker, The Great and Secret Show

“The sun rose like a stripper, keeping its glory well covered by cloud till it seemed there'd be no show at all.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Life is short
And pleasures few
And holed the ship
And drowned the crew
But o! But o!
How very blue
the sea is.”
― Clive Barker

“We burn so hard, but we shed so little light; it makes us crazy and sad.”
― Clive Barker, Galilee

“Give me B movies or give me death! ”
― Clive Barker

“…there’s nothing in the world more fun than doing something you’re good at.”
― Clive Barker, Galilee

“I dreamt 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.”
― Clive Barker

“One man's pornography is another man's theology.”
― Clive Barker

“Superman is, after all, an alien life form. He is simply the acceptable face of invading realities.”
― Clive Barker

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

“There are things that are more important than the news and what’s happening today. There are these archetypes which are part of the human imagination since humans were presumably imaginative. And I think that’s what [people] find touching, these eternal ideas. It’s one of the things that makes fantasy something that tends to stand the test of time because we’re reading, 50 years later, The Lord of the Rings.”
― Clive Barker

“Believe me, when I say;
There are no two powers
That command the soul.
One is God
The other is the tide.
-Anon
From the novel Abarat”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

“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, Abarat

“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, Imajica

“In this sense love is of a different order to any other phenomenon, for it may be both an event and a sign of that invisible mechanism I spoke of before; perhaps the finest sign, the most certain. In it’s throes we need neither luck nor science. We are the wheel, and the man who profits by it. We are the star, and the darkness it pierces. We are the butterfly, brief and beautiful.”
― Clive Barker, Galilee

“Mischief nodded. 'It's true,' he conceded. 'You're in the company of eight world-class thieves,' he said, not without a little touch of pride. 'Saints we are not.'
But then,' said Deaux-Deaux, 'who is?' he thought on this. 'Besides saints.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

“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, The Hellbound Heart

“I haven't even had a life I could call my own, and you're ready to slot me into the grand design. Well, I don't think I want to go. I want to be my own design.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica

“She was a sea: and I had to swim in her.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood 2

“Walk with care in dark places, and do not put your faith in anyone who promises you the forgiveness of the Lord or a certain place in Paradise.”
― Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone

“Have patience; the lovers will suffer lovers always suffer.”
― Clive Barker, Galilee

“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.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.”
― 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, Mister B. Gone

“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, Galilee

“With the inevitability of a tongue returning to probe a painful tooth, we come back and back and back again to our fears, sitting to talk them over with the eagerness of a hungry man before a full and steaming plate.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood 2

“Often people who are wonderful with animals aren't always terribly good with human beings.”
― Clive Barker

“Study nothing except in the knowledge that you already knew it. Worship nothing except in adoration of your true self. And fear nothing except in the certainty that you are your enemy's begetter and its only hope of healing.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica

“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, Mister B. Gone

“Of course it’s the apparently tranquil periods that deceive us. Though our instruments or our senses or our wits may not be able to see the processes that are leading toward these clusters of events, they’re happening. The star, the wheel, the butterfly—all are in a subtle state of unrest, waiting for the moment when some invisible mechanism signals that the time has come. Then the star explodes; the wheel makes poor men rich; the butterfly mates and dies.”
― Clive Barker, Galilee