Clive Barker > Quotes

“I was watching the power at work behind the face of the world. What I had always assumed to be a calamitous unseen war, waged in sky and rock and on occasion invading your human world, was not a bloody battle, with legions slaughtering one another; it was this endless fish-market bartering.”
― Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone

“He got to his feet and stumbled away from the stench of his vomit, making his way through this graveyard of old glories, heading for the darkest place he could find in which to hide his giddy head.”
― Clive Barker, Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

“Some die too soon. Most live too long.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“Somos nuestros propios cementerios; nos instalamos entre las tumbas de las personas que éramos.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume One

“with time, it would all come to fit in some grand design, or so his untethered thoughts persuaded him.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“Every moment she wasted saying No to what she KNEW, was a moment lost to comprehension. That her worldview couldn't contain such a mystery without shattering was its liability, and a problem for another day.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“At thirty-four, she'd decided she'd grown out of sex. Bed was for sleep, especially for fat girls.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood Volume 2

“What was below could remain below no longer.

The Nightbreed were rising.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“He was no longer innocent. With this slaughter he became the killer Decker had persuaded him he was. In murdering the prophet he made the prophecy true.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“You think I’m finished, so you’re leaving me to be crucified by every piece of shit journalist in the fucking country.”
― Clive Barker, Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

“Sweets to the sweet," he murmured,”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 5

“Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.”
― Clive Barker, Weave World

“what would a Resurrection be without a few laughs?”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“It was bad enough that these creatures had children and art; that they might also have vision was too dangerous a thought to entertain.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Men. Young men. Legal age, mind you. But young nonetheless. And it’s not what you think. When we meet, we make … magic.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“Why do boys always love talking about ghosts and murders and hangings?’ ‘Because it’s exciting,’ Wendell said.”
― Clive Barker, The Thief of Always: A Fable

“Con el tiempo todas las cosas se cansan y comienzan a buscar algún oponente que las salve de sí mismas.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“IT WAS THE PIVOTAL teaching of Pluthero Quexos, the most celebrated dramatist of the Second Dominion, that in any fiction, no matter how ambitious its scope or profound its theme, there was only ever room for three players. Between warring kings, a peacemaker; between adoring spouses, a seducer or a child. Between twins, the spirit of the womb. Between lovers, Death. Greater numbers might drift through the drama, of course—thousands in fact—but they could only ever be phantoms, agents, or, on rare occasions, reflections of the three real and self-willed beings who stood at the center. And even this essential trio would not remain intact; or so he taught. It would steadily diminish as the story unfolded, three becoming two, two becoming one, until the stage was left deserted.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica: Featuring New Illustrations and an Appendix

“Women are these wonderful mysteries and they excite me on all kinds of levels. Their power over us is, I think, often a moral power as well as a sexual power. I think women, generally speaking, have a better sense of what is whole and good and sensible. The old feminist line, 'Take the toys from the boys' is an extremely sensible observation, you know?”
― Clive Barker

“I saw the heart of nothing, and survived.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volume Three

“She felt their perversity as a quality of the air. She breathed it in and out. It scoured her lungs and hurried her heart.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“As much as you feel as though you need to find some relevant bit of information for your story to work, research distracts from your writing and inevitably leads you down a rabbit hole of websites and articles and, more than likely, the temptation of checking your email or your Facebook profile or the baseball scores on ESPN.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“this is why men go underground. To remember why they live in the sun.”
― Clive Barker, The Great And Secret Show

“I keep a bedside journal. I am very affected by dream information. They might be scary to other people, but they're mine, so they don't feel scary. I'd wake up in a cold sweat if I didn't dream these things...”
― Clive Barker

“All I've ever wanted to do is darken the day and brighten the night.”
― Clive Barker

“Handwriting everything, for me, is psychologically useful because it keeps my writing economical. I think there are word processor styles emerging. Something does seem to happen to a writer's style when he works on a word processor. When you hand write a thing the size of Weaveworld (584 pages) you want to make sure every word counts because it's such a huge labour to get it down.”
― Clive Barker

“Each man, woman and child in that seething tower was sightless. They saw only through the eyes of the city. They were thoughtless, but to think the city’s thoughts. And they believed themselves deathless, in their lumbering, relentless strength. Vast and mad and deathless.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“If nothing lets to make us happy both But this my masculine usurp’d attire, Do not embrace me till each circumstance Of place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump That I am Viola.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“At least she wasn’t alone. All she had to do was follow the sound of the music and she’d surely find the music maker, sooner or later. The more of the melody she heard, the more bittersweet it seemed to be. It was the kind of song her grandfather (her mom’s dad, Grandpa O’Donnell) used to sing when she was little. Laments, he called them. “What’s a lament?” she had asked him one day. “A song about the sad things in the world,” he’d told her, his voice tinged with a little of his Irish roots. “Lovers parted, and ships lost at sea, and the world full of loneliness from one end to the other.” “Why’d you want to sing about sad things?” Candy had asked him. “Because any fool can be happy,” he’d said to her. “It takes a man with real heart”—he’d made a fist and laid it against his chest—“to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep. — Robert Frost Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld