Clive Barker > Quotes

“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

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

“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

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

“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

“Her mother had always said that women, being more at peace with themselves than men, needed fewer distractions from their hurts.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“Here are the stories written on the Book of Blood. They are a map of that dark highway that leads out of life towards unknown destinations. Few will have to take it, most will go on peacefully along lamplit streets, ushered out of living with prayers and caresses. But for a few, a chosen few, the horrors will come, skipping to fetch them off to the highway of the damned...”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volumes Four to Six

“He wouldn’t be remembered well.”
― Clive Barker, The Great And Secret Show

“All Darkness was one darkness in the end. Of heart or Heavens, one Darkness.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“And in time it will be as though men had never come to this perfect corner of the world—never called it paradise on earth, never despoiled it with their dream factories; and in the golden hush of the afternoon all that will be heard will be the flittering of dragonflies, and the murmur of hummingbirds as they pass from bower to bower, looking for a place to sup sweetness.”
― Clive Barker, Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

“For some reason, the doodles that she had drawn in her workbook came back into her mind. Only this time, instead of being black lines on gray, recycled paper, they were bright in her mind; very bright. And all kinds of colors, the way the sun appeared in your mind if you looked at it for a moment and then closed your eyes. Dozens of little suns: green and red and gold; then colors, too, that you couldn't even name. That was the way the lines looked in Candy's mind's eye.

And they were moving. The wavy lines were rolling across the darkness inside her skull, rolling and breaking, the brilliant colors bursting into arabesques of white and silver.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

“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, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“If life was simpler we wouldn't get lost in it”
― Clive Barker

“Are you ready for the apocalypse?”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“They will say your doubts shed innocent blood. But I say - what's blood for, if not for shedding?”
― Clive Barker, The Forbidden

“Lost in the wasteland, Ashbery was found by a light flickering up from between the fractured paving stones. Its beams were bitterly cold, and sticky in a way light had no right to be, adhering to his sleeve and hand before fading away. Intrigued, he tracked its source from one eruption to another, each point brighter than the one before.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal