Clive Barker > Quotes

“Bitches, most of us. Me included. But sometimes you need to be a bitch so you can get through the day.”
― Clive Barker, Coldheart Canyon

“Zombies are the ideal late twentieth-century monsters. A zombie is the one thing you can't deal with. It survives anything. Frankenstein's monster and Dracula could be sent down in so many ways. Zombies, though, fall outside all this. You can't argue with them. They just keep coming at you.”
― Clive Barker

“He smelled their heat and hungered for it. He saw their terror and took strength from it. They stole such authority for themselves, these people. Made themselves arbiters of good and bad, natural and unnatural, justifying their cruelty with spurious laws. Now they saw a simpler law at work as their bowels remembered the oldest fear: of being prey.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“By and large I think art is made by people who have discipline married to talent in sufficiently large amounts to work even if they don't feel like it. Anybody can get maudlin and decide to write poetry at 11 at night; the question is, can you do it at 8:30 on a Monday morning..?”
― Clive Barker

“...for sexuality is all too often the territory of the sentimentalist or the pornographer, too seldom that of the visionary. Yet it's a transforming act, literally. It remakes our bodies, for a time; and our minds too. For a little space we know obsession intimately; we are at the call of chemical instructions which sharpen our senses while at the same time narrowing our focus, so that our perceptions are heightened and refined. Horror fiction has traditionally had much to say about all these subjects: transformation, obsession and perception. Sex, with its ecstasies and its petit mort;its private rituals and its public corruptions; its way of reminding us that all physical pleasure is rooted in the same body that shits, sweats and withers, is the perfect stuff for the horror writer, and there can be few artists working in the genre as capable of analyzing and dramatizing such territory as the author of the volume you hold.”
― Clive Barker

“Harvey Swick was eaten by the great gray beast February.”
― Clive Barker, The Thief of Always

“What matters is there's something in you which is unique to you. And that's the only thing that matters. Not being the next Clive Barker, not being the next… whatever. What matters is being the next whoever you are. The only whoever you are. And - right or wrong - I'm the only Clive Barker.”
― Clive Barker

“She would wait and watch, as she had always watched and waited, hoping that such a puzzle would one day come to her. But if it failed to show itself she would not grieve too deeply, for fear that the mending of broken hearts be a puzzle neither wit nor time had the skill to solve.”
― Clive Barker

“Here let me be quite clear: the primary impulse behind such creations is not escapism. That implies a kind of cowardice in the face of the world, which is not what inspires such visions. Quite the reverse. It is a hunger to see more clearly that fuels the true fantasist. A desire to express the world’s transforming heart.”
― Clive Barker, The Essential Clive Barker: Selected Fiction

“New York was just a city. He had seen her wake in the morning like a slut, and pick murdered men from between her teeth, and suicides from the tangles of her hair.”
― Clive Barker

“They won't fall for this.'
'They already have, sister. Holy wars are easier to start than rumours, amongst your Kind or mine...”
― Clive Barker, Weave World

“I never wanted my body except as a vehicle. I never really wanted anything at all except to be sky.”
― Clive Barker, THE GREAT AND SECRET SHOW

“Aeschylus was killed by a tortoise.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Your flesh is killing your spirit”
― Clive Barker

“They worship me,” she told him. “Call me Goddess; Mother of the Night. They emasculate themselves in order to better show their adulation.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Existence is just a Mobius strip with Love scrawled on one side and Death upon the other.”
― Clive Barker

“Your most treasured depravity is child's play beside the experiences we offer.”
― Clive Barker

“People often ask me what advice I have for writers, and I reply that the most important responsibility I believe a writer has is to his or her personal truth. Don't be misled by the best seller lists. Just do what feels true to you. Speak your heart, however strange or revelatory it is. Don't be ashamed of how your imagination works. What a reader wants to discover in a book is what you hold uniquely in your head."I think making stories which touch people deeply is always hard. I've been writing plays and books for 20 years and I still go to my desk every morning with a mixture of excitement and dread.”
― Clive Barker

“There is a difference," he said, "between the wise man who gives up because the task is beyond him, and the coward who does not even consider trying. You are brave, but bravery is not enough.”
― Clive Barker, Clive Barker's First Tales

“I think sometimes horror fiction has a significance which we forget, which is if you fear something in fiction, you have the chance of a resolution. You have a chance that the story will finish itself.”
― Clive Barker

“… my imagemaking and storymaking are associated… My sketches act as notes…

It’s almost like the drawing is the equivalent of the first curl of an idea… In Nightbreed, the drawing would be the equivalent of just writing on a piece of paper, as I did once, ‘How about a saint for monsters?’ Finally, that idea of ‘How about a saint for monsters?’ became Cabal. By an incredibly different route, but that’s what it ended up becoming. This idea, Saint Boone of Midian, of something that was holy to monsters - a saviour for monsters - became intriguing to me, and yet eventually it had to become this public thing as well, because you have to sell the idea to your publisher, and you have to hone it, and then your agent has something to say, and then your editor has something to say, whereas the drawing or the sketch is simply that first statement.”
― Clive Barker, Clive Barker : Illustrator

“I also believe that the effect of such a passage in an uncanny tale depends not just on the selection of language but on its rhythm. I tend to hear that in my head, which is one reason my tales seem to read well aloud. The odd small edit takes care of inadvertent rhyming, an element I dislike: hence “leave the tunnel by the far end and tiptoe up behind him” becomes “leave the tunnel by the far end so as to tiptoe up behind him.” Indeed, even in the present paragraph I originally wrote “one reason why my tales seem to read well aloud.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“A desert, in which his dust blew with the dust of all the things he’d ever loved and lost; blew to the end of time and knew neither rest nor meaning.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“The pestilence of families Is not congenital disease But feet that follow where the foot That has proceeded them was put.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“I cannot go through life dreaming all the time, existing through the darkness on only a glimpse of heaven.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood

“I want you to see beautiful things for me.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Everybody is a book of blood; Wherever we’re opened, we’re red.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“He kissed her as he worked, and swallowed the pestilence with her spittle; his hands came off her body gritty with her contagious cells. He knew none of this, of course. He was perfectly innocent of what corruption he embraced, and took into himself with every uninspired thrust.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volumes Four to Six

“I love masks for two completely contrary reasons… One is that they they’re a way of covering up an experience or a feeling. The other is that they’re a way of exposing through a liberation. A mask is a way of taking on another personality for a period of time.

Now, I play it both ways, I think, in the drawings, and in the fiction as well. Clearly there are some things that we can do in masked form that we would not otherwise – this is the classic dramatic device of the masked ball. You put on the mask and you’re allowed to do all kinds of things that hitherto you wouldn’t do: you seduce the people you would fear to seduce unmasked; you say the things you most fear to say unmasked.

But there’s another way, which is that masks can be something that we plaster onto our faces to cover up the possibility of this eruption. I think masks have two quite contrary forms… I think some of the masks I’ve put on characters are very bland – wilfully bland. And then others seems to want erupt in all directions. That’s the paradox.’

Barker’s love affair with the stage also plays a part in his affection for these symbols of theatre. ‘There’s a whole series of sketches of actors, basically… People with masks on killing each other with wooden swords. People with masks on seducing each other. Just very simple ideas for things. They compare, forcibly, I think, with the masks which are just simply hanging up or floating in the air, as though the person who had once occupied them has just flitted away.’ Indeed, one of the most powerful of these pictures is a simple study of a mask hanging from a tree, laid aside carefully while its owner has a moment in which he doesn’t require it.

There are also those masks which allow the wearers to express themselves in a way maybe they couldn’t otherwise… expressing themselves more strongly than human physiognomy will allow.’ Seen in this light, the monsters of Nightbreed and The Skins of the Fathers are clearly just a larger than life version of humanity - just like us beneath their demon masks; seen in this light, we could all just as easily put on the tragic button eyes and zipper mouth of a homicidal maniac.

Barker, both in his artwork and his words, remains sagely mute on the obvious (and moralistic) question: are we truest to ourselves when we put on our masks, or when we take them off? If anything, his drawings will admit only to unembroidered irony and acceptance. When two lovers sit in a studied yet impassioned embrace – his penis erect, her nipples swollen – they are able to reveal these most private parts of themselves freely. It is their faces, seemingly the most public part of their personae, that are, in reality, still hidden, as they proceed through life as actors in this stageplay of their own creation.

By trying on masks, people experiment with who they are and with who they want to be, free in the knowledge that they can turn back at any time. After all, pretending to be a fish is still a long way from becoming one. It should come as no surprise that, when we begin with humanity and then expose its masks, we find ourselves at transformation, the heart of Barker’s fiction.

It is not always an easy place to be.

‘These images of transformation are, for me, ways to draw characters that are exploding out of their condition into something else. Becoming something else. Dissolving into something else… There isn’t rage in the drawings. There’s an awful lot less anger in the drawings than there is in the fiction. When there are images of constriction they tend to be very strong images of constriction, and then there is an eruption from that constriction. There are a lot more images of peace, or at least the possibility of peace, in my drawings than there are in the fiction.”
― Clive Barker, Clive Barker : Illustrator

“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