Clive Barker > Quotes

“Memories can be treacherous. We all have a hunger to rearrange our histories so as to remember ourselves in the most flattering light.”
― Clive Barker, The Adventures of Mr. Maximillian Bacchus and His Travelling Circus

“It was his old life he dreamt. He stood in the shuttered room that lay between his ears and let the lost days appear on the wall like a lantern show; moments retrieved from some stockpile he hadn’t even known he’d owned. But the scenes that were paraded before him now — these passages from the unfinished book of his life — no longer seemed quite real. It was fiction, that book; or at best momentarily real, when some part of him had leapt from that stale story, and glimpsed the Fugue in waiting.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“And there... he realised that he had a subject, a labour of love that would give him purpose, that would make sense in the senseless academic world. He would not have to let his studies go to hell. He would be the luckiest of men: someone whose private obsessions and public life intersected.”
― Clive Barker, Tonight, Again

“Three is the number of those who do holy work; Two is the number of those who do lover’s work; One is the number of those who do perfect evil Or perfect good. —From the notes of a monk of the Order of St. Oco; his name unknown”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

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

“It was, for a moment, not her who started out between the bars. It was something dredged up from the bottom of the sea. Black eyes swiveling in a gray head. Some primeval genus that viewed him — he knew this to his marrow — with hatred in its bowels.”
― Clive Barker

“Whatever gets you through the night was an axiom he understood from hard experience.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“I’ve heard writers defend some pretty appalling stuff by arguing that they have an obligation to depict the world as it is, but fiction has no such obligation. It’s not a mirror to reality, it’s a prism. It refracts experience. Also, I think some writers are reluctant to admit that part of their aim is to shock the reader, and that’s a downward spiral. We have, as consumers, become increasingly inured to violence. Most of us are pretty hard to shock.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“She preferred her lovers twenty years Swann's junior—he looked, someone had observed, like a man in mourning for his profile, but his touch promised what no boy could offer. She”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 6

“but in an instant he had his head on the ground, and oh, the comfort of it. It was like returning to a lover’s bed on a morning of a frost.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Within the space of a few hours the drab house was repainted with light, and fun and love. It made the Yattering sick.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“Certaines étoiles mettent plus de temps que d’autre à apparaître. Le paradoxe est le suivant : plus il fait nuit, plus ces secrets deviennent visibles. Pour finir, ils se déploient dans toute leur splendeur ; et ce sont ces choses même que nous dissimulons, ces choses dont nous avons le plus honte, dont nous nous servons pour nous guider.”
― Clive Barker

“I have deeper journeys to take. Metaphysical journeys to see Christ. Shaman journeys. It's what I have been elected by God to do.”
― Clive Barker

“The Four Roots of the Seerkind. The Lo, the Ye-me, the Aia, and the Babu. The Families from which we’re all descended. Some of us came by grubbier roads than others, of course”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Paradise always has to be stranger than you expect, doesn’t it? or it loses its power to enchant.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“She knew he was telling the truth, the kind of unsavoury truth that only monsters were at liberty to tell. He had no need to flatter or cajole; he had no philosophy to debate, or sermon to deliver. His awful nakedness was a kind of sophistication. Past the lies of faith, and into purer realms.”
― Clive Barker

“There are some people, you know, who are too important to ever be forgotten. I think she’s one of them.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

“And I want some other stuff. A radio, for one. I want to know what’s going on out there. And food: proper food. Fresh bread—”
“Whatever you need.”
“—and ginger. The preserved kind, you know? In syrup.”
“I know.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“No matter how fantastical the story, true life experience gives it credibility. Dropping in elements of your own life, telling bits of detail borrowed from your memory bank, give the reader a feeling of assurance. It’s the old story about how to tell a lie. Don’t make it all up, tell the lie with large dollops of truth. The truth can give foundation to the most outrageous of lies.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

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

“To a creature trained to put its meddling fingers into the wounds of the human psyche, Polo offered a surface so glacial, so utterly without distinguishing marks, as to deny malice any hold whatsoever.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“Damn fool that she was to have valued pride over sensation.”
― Clive Barker, The Great and Secret Show

“Take this all of you and eat it. This is my body which will be given up for you … Old words; old rituals. But they still made sound commercial sense. Talk of Power and Might would always attract an audience. Lords never went out of fashion.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Of all the powers that made the system manifest, love, and its companion, passion, and their companion, loss, were the most potent.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“It was enough to know they had no Devil on their backs. Just old humanity, cheated of love, and ready to pull down the world on its head.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“Got you, little thief!” he roared, dragging Harvey back into his splintery embrace.”
― Clive Barker, The Thief of Always

“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.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart: A Novel

“I think it's an indulgence to [write] the other [non-linear] way. I think it's a kind of cowardice. There are places in anyone's books that are going to be easier than other parts. And if when you come to a part that's difficult and think, 'Hm, I'll skip that,' all you're doing is lining up these problems that are going to wait for you and kick you in the ass. So I'm very rigorous with myself. I won't allow myself to go on to a fun bit, like the sex. I think if you write big books like I do, and don't write in a linear fashion, something inevitably gets screwed up in the emotional flow. In Coldheart Canyon there are many characters, and each character has its own arc. The arcs start at divergent points, but they converge at roughly the same point. So what you try to do is induce in the reader an incredible feeling of excitement, because everybody's arcs are resolving because they're encountering one another, right? It's not that they're resolving in an abstraction. They're resolving because A meets B meets C and so on.”
― Clive Barker

“Las estaciones se buscan una a la otra, como el hombre y la mujer, a fin de poder curarse de sus propios excesos.

La primavera, si se dilata más de una semana de su límite final, comienza a sentir ansias de que el verano ponga fin a los días de promesas perpetuas. El verano, a su vez, pronto comienza a sudar, pidiendo algo que aplaque su calor y el más mórbido de los otoños finalmente acaba por cansarse de la benevolencia y muere de ganas de que una rápida y penetrante escarcha aniquile toda su fecundidad.

Incluso el invierno —la estación más dura, más implacable— sueña con las llamas que en breve lo derretirán, mientras febrero avanza lentamente. Con el tiempo, todas las cosas se cansan y comienzan a buscar algún oponente que las salve de sí mismas.”
― Clive Barker