Clive Barker > Quotes

“There's no delight the equal of dread.”
― Clive Barker, Dread [Graphic Novel]

“The sun rose like a stripper, keeping its glory well covered by cloud till it seemed there’d be no show at all, then casting off its rags one by one.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Fear in front and bedlam behind.”
― Clive Barker

“The less alive you were the better chance you had at living. There was probably a lesson in there somewhere, though it was a bitter one. Live like a stone and death might pass you by.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“As she did so, a rotund, bearded individual in his fifties, a coat draped over his shoulders and a brimmed hat on his head, stepped forward. Frederick Cammell,”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“A world of yearning and need was suddenly a place of surfeit; and the end of mankind began, for there was nothing left invisible, or unknowable, and therefore nothing left to hope for or desire.”
― Clive Barker, Chiliad: A Meditation

“Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born. —Matthew Arnold, The Grande Chartreuse”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“It was the end of the world, and the beginning of worlds.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“All this talk of necromancy was just a morbid veil drawn over the filthy truth of the matter. Poor Elise! Stuck with a broken-down husband, who knew no better way to please than to give her over to an Englishman for an occasional pleasuring. Of all things, an Englishman! As if the English knew anything about making love.

("Haeckel's Tale")”
― Clive Barker, Best New Horror 17

“Books are like people, when they are open they are red”
― Clive Barker

“I dreamed I spoke in another’s language, I dreamed I lived in another’s skin, I dreamed I was my own beloved, I dreamed I was a tiger’s kin. I dreamed that Eden lived inside me, And when I breathed a garden came, I dreamed I knew all of Creation, I dreamed I knew the Creator’s name. I dreamed—and this dream was the finest— That all I dreamed was real and true, And we would live in joy forever, You in me, and me in you.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

“In this maelstrom his feelings for her had the purity of mathematics. Its equations—complex, but elegant in their proofs—offered a nicety that was like truth. He had to hold on to this recognition. If he once relinquished it he was lost.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“It would not have made a good book, I think. It would have been a folly. Its best telling was in these paragraphs: they contain all the ironies a tome would have contained, and waste less ink.”
― Clive Barker, Chiliad: A Meditation

“farcical failure in the digestive system”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 3

“You hear stories all the time, about how some lucky man escaped death because he sneezed, or died for the same reason. Tales of benign providence, or fatal bad fortune. And after a while you begin to look at the world a little differently: you begin to see chance at work everywhere. You become alive to its mysteries. And of course to its flip side; to determinism. Because take it from me there are men who make their own luck. Men who can mold chance like putty. You talked yourself of feeling a tingle in your hands. As though today, whatever you did, you couldn't lose.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“Pleasure is a reward, given to the human system by evolution in return for services rendered to the preservation and increase of the species.”
― Clive Barker, Chiliad: A Meditation

“O little one, My little one, Come with me, Your life is done. Forget the future, Forget the past. Life is over: Breathe your last.” ― Clive Barker, Abarat”
― Clive Barker

“انسان ها افراد ناسپاسی هستند که خداوند متعال را با اختیاری که به آنها داده است به محل سوء استفاده ی خود قرار داده اند ، جنگ و خونریزی و ناعدالتی نمایش غرور و خودکامگی انسان ها در جهان است با ستایش و عبادت خدا است که بین قلوب انسان ها محبت و دوستی به وسیله ی آفریدگار مهربان شکل می گیرد و جنگ و خونریزی جای آن را به صلح و مهربانی شکل می گیرد.”
― Clive Barker

“everywhere along the street the same domestic rituals that he’d witnessed here since his childhood were being played out. Radios announced the morning’s news through open windows and doors: a Parliamentarian had been found dead in his mistress’ arms; bombs had been dropped in the Middle East. Slaughter and scandal, scandal and slaughter. And was the tea too weak this morning, my dear? and did the children wash behind their ears?”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“In addition, she had on board one member of that species who walked behind the stars. Its name was ninety-one syllables long, but it answered to Nephauree. The physical form it presented to her was an illusion: a thin wavering line of smoke-shadow, standing three times her height. Of its true form, she knew nothing. Once she'd made the error of demanding that she see it as it actually was, and the experience had had almost made her ready to stab out her own eyes. The experience had been so traumatizing, she remembered nothing of what she'd seen, but she knew what lay just a few vibrations of vision behind the smoke-shadow was a thing so vile, so repugnant, so utterly without beauty or virtue, that no mind could witness it and remain sane. It was an engine of venoms and despair.”
― Clive Barker , Abarat

“The proximity of this harem aroused him, despite circumstances. He opned his trousers and caressed his cock, more eager to have the seed spilled and so be freed of these creatures than for the pleasure of it.”
― Clive Barker

“Every day is a writing day. I get to my desk between 8 and 8:30 in the morning and then work through until 6pm, and then normally I'll take up whatever will be happening in the evening, usually painting or photography.

I do about four drafts total. I do handwritten drafts because I don't type and I have no wish to type. I mean, I know how to type, but I have no interest in putting the words down that way.
Maybe that's because I'm an artist and because I've always used a pen and so there's a sort of natural feel to it.

I don't know how familiar you are with Blake's illuminated texts, but you know very often he'll literally make words flower. It's really this glorious thing in bringing words and pictures into the same place, the same space.”
― Clive Barker

“director is the loneliest creature on God’s earth. He knows what’s good and bad in a show, or he should if he’s worth his salt, and he has to carry that information around with him and keep smiling.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“marriages between humankind and the great bestiary”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

“This is the state of the beast," it said, "to eat and be eaten.”
― Clive Barker

“Horror shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory.”
― Clive Barker

“Perhaps to be flawless was another kind of sadness.”
― Clive Barker

“The first of the quintet to be called was a young woman in a long, dark dress, her small face pale, her closed eyes fringed with ginger lashes. This, the bees said, is Lilia Pellicia.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“If that was the way the world worked—by omens and prophecies—then it was at least a system, and she had lived too long without one. Love”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“In the high times of his evil, Hood had been the House. Now, it was the other way around. The House, what was left of it, had become Mr. Hood.”
― Clive Barker, The Thief of Always