Clive Barker > Quotes

“So intent was Frank upon solving the puzzle of Lemarchand’s box that he didn’t hear the great bell begin to ring.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“He liked the phrase “mother’s tit.” It said so much, so simply. Momma’s tit had a good deal more power to move these men than her apple pie.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“Fear gripped Harry, like some old dope-pusher promising a terrible high.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 6

“But everything slipped through his fingers sooner or later, and with time he began to wonder whether it was circumstance that denied him a good hold on his earnings, or whether he simply didn’t care enough to keep what he had. The train of thought, once begun, was a runaway. Everywhere, in the wreckage around him, he found evidence to support the same bitter thesis: that he had encountered nothing in his life—no person, no state of mind or body—he wanted sufficiently to suffer even passing discomfort for. A downward spiral began. He spent three months in a wash of depression and self pity that bordered on the suicidal. But even that solution was denied him by his newfound nihilism. If nothing was worth living for it followed, didn’t it, that there was nothing worth dying for either.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Muck held the whip hand.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“She’s got powers,” said de Bono, taking off his spectacles and surveying the terrain ahead. “Most women have, of course.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Not a classic reunion. The lover, on seeing his beloved, throws up down his shirt. But then, nothing that happened between Jacqueline and myself was ever quite normal.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“The seasons long for each other, like men and women, in order that they may be cured of their excesses.

Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise. Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for something to quench its heat, and the mellowest of autumns will tire of gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its fruitfulness.

Even winter—the hardest season, the most implacable—dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. 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

“You’ve got blood on your hands, and you smell of coitus.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica: Featuring New Illustrations and an Appendix

“The extraordinary thing is this: that the moment you make a story or create an image that finds favour with an audience, you’ve effectively lost it. It toddles off, the little bastard; it becomes the property of the fans. It’s they who create around it their own mythologies; who make sequels and prequels in their imagination; who point out the inconsistencies in your plotting. I can envisage no greater compliment. What more could a writer or a film maker ever ask, than that their fiction be embraced and become part of the dream-lives of people who it’s likely he’ll never meet?”
― Clive Barker, Clive Barker's Hellraiser Vol. 1

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

“The Monastery of the Cenobitical Order was a large-walled compound built seven hundred thousand years ago on a damned-made hill of stone and cement.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“Forgive yourself,’ Boone said. ‘I did.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“You still love her, don’t you?” Pie said, once they were out and walking. “Of course I love her,” Estabrook said. “That’s why I want her dead.” “There’s no resurrection, Mr. Estabrook. Not for you, at least.” “It’s not me who’s dying,” he said. “I think it is,” came the”
― Clive Barker, Imajica: Featuring New Illustrations and an Appendix

“Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Si el amor se alimenta de música, seguid tocando"
(Shakepeare)”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume One

“Dream!
Forge yourself and rise
Out of your mind and into others.
Men, be women.
Fish, be flies.
Girls, take beards.
Sons, be your mothers.
The future of the world now lies
In coral wombs behind our eyes.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Absolute Midnight

“Was that the point about scattering ashes: that in the end they looked the same? Not just the snout and the tail, but a dog’s ashes and a man’s ashes. All reducible, with the addition of a little flame, to this mottled dust?”
― Clive Barker, Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

“They're not in the gutter because they had visions, Gentle,” Clem said. “They're there because they've been abused, or they've abused themselves.” “Which means they can't cover their despair the way the rest can. They've got no distractions from their pain. So they get drunk and crazy, and the next day they're even more lost than they were the day before. But I'd still rather trust them than all the bishops and the ministers. Maybe they're naked, but isn't that a holy state?”
― Clive Barker, Imajica: The Reconciliation

“First, my love and thanks to Ben Smith, my Hollywood agent, who has been a true visionary in a job that is often maligned (in this book, for instance)”
― Clive Barker, Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

“It's always what may not be shown that shows the most. Forbidden words are always the most eloquent.”
― Clive Barker, Tonight, Again

“The World. Hugo had once told Nathaniel in Will's presence, was made by many men, but shaped by few. The important thing was to be one of those few; to find a place in which you could change the repetitive patterns of the many Through political influence and intellectual discourse, and failing either of these , through benign coercion.”
― Clive Barker - Sacrament

“There was a primitive power in naming someone. It gave you a handle on a person.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“He had certainly set his eyes on more voluptuous creatures , but something about her lack of glamour engaged him. Such women were in his experience often more entertaining company than beauties like Julia. They could be flattered or bullied into acts the beauties would never countenance and be grateful for the attention.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“She was so beautiful, you see. Not in any two-dimensional sense: she wasn’t young, she wasn’t innocent, she didn’t have that pristine symmetry so favored by ad-men and photographers. Her face was plainly that of a woman in her early forties: it had been used to laugh and cry, and usage leaves its marks. But she had a power to transform herself, in the subtlest way, making that face as various as the sky.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“So many masks. Was she the only one who had no secret life, no other self in marrow or mind?”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“The carcass closest to him was the remains of the pimply youth he'd seen in Car One. The body hung upside-down, swinging back and forth to the rhythm of the train, in unison with its three fellows; an obscene danse macabre. Its arms dangled loosely from the shoulder joints, into which gashes an inch or two deep had been made, so the bodies would hang more neatly.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“Our lives are scattered throughout with periods of unbelonging; in childhood, of course, and adolescence; but in adulthood too, when sudden loss (or gain) forces us to reassess things we believe immutable.”
― Clive Barker, The Nightbreed Chronicles

“So quickly? Todd cleared away another wave of tears and looked down at the body on the table. Dempsey’s eye was still half-open, but it didn’t look back at him any longer. Where there’d been a sliver of bright life, where there’d been mischief and shared rituals—where, in short, there’d been Dempsey—there was nothing.”
― Clive Barker, Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story