Clive Barker > Quotes

“He started down the slope towards it, dressed in the blood of his enemy.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“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, Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

“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.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica

“I decided that I would do my best to be the worst thing Hell ever vomited forth.”
― Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone

“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

“Only once did Lori glimpse such an entity, supine on a mattress in the corner of its boudoir. It was naked, corpulent and sexless, its sagging body a motley of dark, oily skin and larval eruptions that seeped phosphorescence, soaking its simple bed.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“The way she saw it, she was lucky. She wasn't really blind—she just saw a different world from most other folks, and that put her in a unique position to do some good in the world.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“To every hour, its mystery. At dawn, the riddles of life and light. At noon, the conundrums of solidity. At three, in the hum and heat of the day, a phantom moon, already high. At dusk, memory. And at midnight? Oh, then the enigma of time itself; of a day that will never come again passing into history while we sleep. It”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“Le stagioni si agognano l’un l’altra, come uomini e donne, in modo da essere guarite dai loro eccessi. La primavera, se si protrae per più di una settimana oltre il suo tempo naturale, comincia a patire l’assenza dell’estate che ponga fine ai giorni della promessa perpetua. L’estate dal suo canto comincia ben presto a invocare qualcosa che plachi la sua calura e il più ubere degli autunni alla lunga si stanca della sua generosità e reclama una rapida, aspra gelata che lo sterilizzi. Persino l’inverno, la più dura delle stagioni, la più implacabile, sogna all’apparire di febbraio la fiamma che presto lo scioglierà. Ogni cosa si stanca con il tempo e comincia a cercare un suo contrario che la salvi da se stessa. Così agosto cedette il posto a settembre e pochi se ne lamentarono.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“I do three drafts handwritten and then it's typed up... They are different from each other, they are hopefully improvements in the sense you're going back over something. The first time you write it, it's the first thing that you can think. The second time you're trying to shape the dialogue, helping the characters. The third time you're doing it because you want the words to sound nice, hopefully making the prose better, making it more fun to read, making the jokes funnier and the scary bits scarier.”
― Clive Barker

“No sword shall touch you. Unless it be mine.” — Anonymous, lover’s oath”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Make your own worlds. Make your own laws. Make your own creations, your own star systems. Don't feel answerable to anyone, or as though you have to create after some preordained model. You don't have to write like myself, or King or Anne Rice: be yourself. Nothing is more wonderful than discovering a new voice, particularly if it happens to be your own.”
― Clive Barker

“The seasons long for each other, like men and women, in order that they may be cured of their excesses.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

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

“You opened their eyes to another world, darling. They'll never forgive you for that.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Absolute Midnight

“In his perversity, or his genius, or both,”
― Clive Barker, Tortured Souls: The Legend of Primordium

“The century's getting old and stale; it needs new tribes.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volumes Four to Six

“Magic is the first and last religion of the world. It has the power to make us whole.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica

“The flawlessly beautiful were flawlessly happy, weren’t they?”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

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

“There is no delight the equal of dread. As long as it's someone else's.”
― Clive Barker, Dread [Graphic Novel]

“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

“Your most treasured depravity is child’s play beside the experiences we offer.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“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

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

“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

“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

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

“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