Clive Barker > Quotes

“He spoke of both dancing and death with equal nonchalance, as though one carried as little significance as the other. It calmed her, hearing him talk that way.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Every man is his own Mephistopheles, don’t you think?”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“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, The Damnation Game

“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, The Scarlet Gospels

“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

“He lay with a pack of panting dogs on a hill overlooking plains where antelope grazed. He marched with ants, and labored in the rigors of the nest, filing eggs. He danced the mating dance of the bower bird, and slept on a warm rock with his lizard kin. He was a cloud. He was the shadow of a cloud. He was the moon that cast the shadow of a cloud. He was a blind fish; he was a shoal; he was a whale; he was the sea. He was the lord of all he surveyed. He was a worm in the dung of a kite. He did not grieve, knowing his life was a day long, or an hour. He did not wonder who made him. He did not wish to be other. He did not pray. He did not hope. He only was, and was, and was, and that was the joy of it.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“And the stories she'd been told, were they confessions of uncommitted crimes, accounts of the worst imaginable, imagined to keep fiction from becoming fact? The thought chased its own tail: these terrible stories still needed a first cause, a well-spring from which they leaped... Were these inventions common currency, as Purcell had claimed? Was there a place, however small, reserved in every heart for the monstrous?”
― Clive Barker

“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.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“He loved getting crucified at the summer and winter solstices,” Norma told Harry. Norma listened while the invisible presence added something to this. “He says you should try it, Harry. A crucifixion and a good blow job. Heaven on Earth.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“And with that comprehension, so unlike the simplifications she’d been ruled by hitherto, she became even more certain that the carpet they carried was a last hope, while he — whose home the Weave contained — seemed increasingly indifferent to its fate, living in the moment and for the moment, touched scarcely at all by hope or regret.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Stories had a way of doing that, in Grillo’s experience. It was his belief that nothing, but nothing, could stay secret, however powerful the forces with interests vested in silence. Conspirators might conspire and thugs attempt to gag but the truth, or an approximation of same, would show itself sooner or later, very often in the unlikeliest form. It was seldom hard facts that revealed the life behind the life. It was rumour, graffiti, strip cartoons and love songs.”
― Clive Barker, The Great And Secret Show

“Your kind has a superstitious terror of things ugly and broken; you fear that their condition may somehow infect you.”
― Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone

“So let it do its worst, if that at the last was inevitable. Let the void come, and bring an end to the tyranny of hope.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“And to think, she'd once had the hots for him, back in the old days (six months ago) when razor-thin men with noses like Durante and an encyclopaedic knowledge of de Niro movies had really been her style. Now she saw him for what he was, flotsam from a lost ship of hope. Still a pill-freak, still a theoretical bisexual, still devoted to early Polanski movies and symbolic pacifism.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volume Three

“Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself. So August gave way to September and there were few complaints.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“She'd taken the harlot century she'd been born into for granted, knowing no other, but now-seeing it with his eyes, hearing it with his ears-she understood it afresh; saw just how desperate it was to please, yet how dispossessed of pleasure; how crude, even as it claimed sophistication; and, despite it's zeal to spellbind, how utterly unenchanting.”
― Clive Barker

“If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke – Aye, and what then?’ S. T. Coleridge Anima Poetae”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“That's half of your trouble," muttered the crocodile. "You believe everything's true."

"That's because everything is," replied Mr. Bacchus.”
― Clive Barker

“Then, having finished with his gesture of remorse, he sat down, like any decent man who has been deeply wronged, and planned murder.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volumes 1-3

“[Imajica took] fourteen months from the time I first put pen to paper till the day I turned it in. That was writing seven days a week, 14 hours a day. Towards the end it was 16 hours a day. But it was a book which obsessed me, right from the very beginning. I don't quite know yet why that is. Part of it was the fact that the sheer scale of it required total immersion if I was going to pull it off. If I hadn't gotten it right - and I hope I've gotten it at least part right - then I would have looked like a real fool, because here I am dealing with Christ and God and magic and all that stuff. And when, halfway the book, the audience realises that Hapexamendios is the same God that people are worshipping when they go to Sunday Mass, the danger was that the audience would say, "Oh, give me a break. I'll accept the idea of an invented god, but now you're asking me to believe that this god is Jehovah, this god is Yahweh, this god is the God whom people worship in the Western world," and that's a very different thing from one of the gods of a [Stephen] Donaldson novel.

There is a danger of alienating [some readers]. I am sure there are going to be people who will say, "Sorry, this is too long." But I also think there's an audience that says, "Give me everything , tell me everything you can tell me.”
― Clive Barker

“Of course. Remember, I’ve seen you in her. And it’s wonderful.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

“I was a weird little kid. I was very irritable, bored, frustrated. I felt my imagination bubbling inside my head without having any way to express itself. Given a crayon and paper, I would not draw a train or a house. I would draw these monsters, beasts and demons.”
― Clive Barker

“Anybody can shrug and say life is just some accident of mud and lightning. But Henry, it isn't. And I mean to show you, in the time we have together--whether it's an hour or a day of whatever it is--I mean to show you that you just have to open your heart and look--you hear me, look--and you'll see every minute a hundred reasons to believe."

"Oh, will you?" Henry said, irritated by Diamanda's tone. "And where will I find these hundred reasons?"

"Everywhere!" Diamanda said. "Don't you see we're born into a pattern so huge and so beautiful and so full of meaning we can only hope to understand a tiny part of it in the seventy or eighty years we live with breath in our bodies? But one day, it will all come clear.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

“Living and dying we feed the fire,” Steep said softly. “That is the melancholy truth of things.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“...tonight they all wished they could cut from their mind's configuration the part that knew—had always known, since infancy—that the great wound of the world was deepening, day on day, and they had no choice but feel the hurt as if it was their own, which of course in part it was.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“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.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

“Nothing, I had come to believe by the end, was more illusory than the idea of ending.”
― Clive Barker, The Great And Secret Show

“Who can call a man dead whose words still hush us and whose sentiments move?”
― Clive Barker, Weave World

“Yes, fantastic fiction can be intricately woven into the texture of our daily lives, addressing important issues in fabulist form. But it also serves to release us for a time from the definitions that confine our daily selves; to unplug us from a world that wounds and disappoints us, allowing us to venture into places of magic and transformation.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“We wouldn't eat an important person like you. Sometimes we'll take a sailor, but —" He shrugged. "— so would you if it was always fish.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat