Clive Barker > Quotes

“What do the good know?’ he said. ‘Except what the bad teach them by their excesses?”
― Clive Barker, The Forbidden

“I write from the dream. I discovered long ago, that to lead a life during the day that is not overwhelmed with writing, the first thing I did was cut my writing time down. When I wake up, I have my coffee and breakfast bar, and go to work. I try to do this before I wake up too much, before the real day shifts into the dream world I have recently left. I work while the ghost of those dreams is still with me. I sit down and write, and as soon as I feel I’ve said what I have to say for the day, I stop working. I do have the goal of managing at least three to five pages a day, but sometimes I manage more. My true work day, not business calls, managing life, but the work and joy of writing, is about three hours. I let the dream decipher itself. And when the edges of it become ragged, I stop.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“I am inevitable.”
― Clive Barker, The Great and Secret Show

“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, Imajica

“I swear, the bigger the bully, the smaller the dick.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“Time would be precious from now on. It would tick by, of course, as it always had, but Harvey was determined he wouldn’t waste it with sighs and complaints. 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, The Thief of Always

“In my Art
I have but
one fear:
that we will
fail to be
fearless.”
― Clive Barker, Tonight, Again

“The World-Soul is sick, Harry, crazy-sick. And if we don’t each do our part and try to get to the root of its pain and burn it out, then everything is for nothing.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“A skin was nothing. Pigs had skins; snakes had skins. They were knitted of dead cells, shed and grown and shed again. But a name? That was a spell, which summoned memories.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“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.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica: Featuring New Illustrations and an Appendix

“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.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“Putting down the devil was the Lord’s own sport.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“My imagination is my polestar; I steer by that.”
― 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 Scarlet Gospels

“All the great powers in the world are blood-suckers and soul-stealers at heart.”
― Clive Barker

“I will treat you with my knife the way you've treated my pages with your merciless eyes. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards.”
― Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone

“When, finally, she did sleep, it was the slumber of a watcher and waiter. Light, and full of sighs.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“This is the state of the beast,' it said, 'to eat and be eaten.”
― Clive Barker, Primal: From the Cradle to the Grave

“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 Life of Death

“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, Books of Blood: Volume 4

“That’s fucked,” he remarked, sounding a damn sight less nonchalant than he felt.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“though she hurried him on, he dawdled, his head back, squinting at the stars. There were no revelations to be had there. Just pinpricks of light in a plain heaven. But he saw for the first time how fine that was. That in a world too full of loss and rage they be remote: the minimum of glory. As she led him across the lightless ground, time and again he could not prevent his gaze from straying skyward.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“The things I will invent will be, I suspect, mundane by comparison with the truth. And as I said, it's my intention that you should not know the difference. I plan to interweave the elements of my story so cunningly that you'll cease to even care whether an event happened out there in the same world where you walk, or in here, in the head of a crippled man who will never again move from his stepmother's house.”
― Clive Barker, Galilee

“Sin lágrimas, por favor. Es un desperdicio de buen sufrimiento.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“I am not your Father. I am but a child, like you. Afraid, like you. Fearing sometimes, as you fear.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Absolute Midnight

“I feel things other people don’t. I don’t think it’s particularly clever of me, or anything like that. I just do it.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“she slipped away unseen, like a shadow's shadow.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 6

“To be able to fly ? To be smoke , or a wolf ;to know the night , and live in it forever ? That's not so bad . You call us monsters . But when you dream it's of flying , and changing , and living without death .”
― Clive Barker

“Your most treasured depravity is child’s play beside the experiences we offer.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound 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.”
― Clive Barker, Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story