Clive Barker > Quotes

“So you can't please all the people all the time. All you can do is what pleases you, and hope that it pleases other people.
I love my readers, and I respect my readers, but I'm not going to simplify or echo myself, copy myself, just so the sales will be better.”
― Clive Barker

“I'm constantly trying to make what Stephen King called head movies or skull movies: things should be playing out on the inside of your eyes, if you will, without you having to think about me as an author being present.
I have no interest in being present, in intervening between you and the work. My job is to be as invisible as possible. My job is to say, 'Hey, I wrote this book and I'm on the cover, bye bye!'
The story should have its own momentum; it should make its own way. I have no patience for that showy kind of writing, which is all about how clever the writer is. Postmodern stuff just leaves me totally cold.
I'm much more interested in being drawn into a book, and I want to create the kind of writing which hopefully makes you turn and turn the pages.”
― Clive Barker

“telling them with faith in the tale, not because every fantasy was absolutely true but because no reality ever was.”
― Clive Barker, The Great And Secret Show

“And that face. It was wonderfully alive, the features playing the story of her speech with delicate economy.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“In the final arithmetic his life was a wasteland: of fire, of snow, of sand. All of it, a wasteland, and he would wander there ’til he could wander no more.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“They were one indivisible thought, imagining each other.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“Things came and went away; that was a kind of magic. And in between? Pursuits and conjurings, horrors, guises. The occasional joy.
That there was room for joy, ah! that was magic too.”
― Clive Barker, The Last Illusion

“Once the work is up and under way, once the world is breathing, you have to surrender to it: to its rhythms, to its intentions, to its ugliness, sometimes; to its beauty, others. Sometimes this surrender, which is the second state of creation, feels perilous. You float in a murky place for long periods, waiting for the sense of things to show itself. Doubt devours you. This time, you think, there’s nothing there to bear you up. You’re just going to sink, while these illusions you created watch you go down. And then, miraculously, something begins to happen. The story begins to move before you, like a pageant. Still surrendering, you describe it. If you’re lucky, there are days when this other world is so familiar to you that you can operate in that journalistic fashion I described before and simply report what you see. Some days too when you have to wait, not pushing too hard, not demanding that the sense of all this show itself before it wants to; listening, deeply; watching, deeply.”
― Clive Barker, The Essential Clive Barker: A Dark Fantasy and Horror Compendium Where Imagination and Terror Collide

“Whether you are a good or bad writer is an irrelevancy when you first begin. What's important is that you write, you get up in the morning and you say, "I'm going to treat this like a job and I'm not going to just do this when I feel like it. I'm going to really get to work on making this the best I can make it, and work hard to achieve something". You can't sit around waiting for inspiration to strike like lightning, cause you'll wait around for a long time. Maybe once every blue moon a piece of lightning will strike, but most of the time you'll wait around twiddling your thumbs. What you have to do is just get on with it, and write whatever comes out and not worry over much about whether the punctuation is right or the spelling is right or even if the order of the words is right, but just get on with it.
"You have to go after, seek after the things which are truthful to you. And I mean truthful. If you don't believe in Christ, then don't have a hero whipping out holy water when it suits him, because you're not telling the truth about what you believe about the world. If you don't believe that the image of Christ is ethicasy in the world, then don't have your hero use it in such a way. All you doing is accessing a series of cliches from somebody else's work. If you're gay, write about gay characters. If you're straight, write about straight characters. If you're straight and confused, write about straight and confused characters. If your passion is about painting and football, write about painting and football. Write about your mother, write about your father, write about things you know, and then let your imagination lurk on those things and develop them into something new and fresh even for you. Surprise yourself, astonish yourself, and tell the truth. ”
― Clive Barker

“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

“If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it; that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die—”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“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

“The dead have highways. They run, unerring lines of ghost-trains, of dream-carriages, across the wasteland behind our lives, bearing an endless traffic of departed souls. Their thrum and throb can be heard in the broken places of the world, through cracks made by acts of cruelty, violence and depravity. Their freight, the wandering dead, can be glimpsed when the heart is close to bursting, and sights that should be hidden come plainly into view.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“It was no Palace of Delights. It bred death, not pleasure.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“...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

“Whatever violence had been done there, it had opened the house up, as surely as a knife slits a fish’s belly; and through that cut, that wound in the world, the dead peered out, and had their say.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“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

“There had been times of late when he would have preferred a death by wild horses to the itch of suspicion that had so degraded his joy.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart: A Novel

“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

“He was a haunter of sleep, and an awakener of terrors.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“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: A Dark Fantasy and Horror Compendium Where Imagination and Terror Collide

“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

“After all, he thought, does the beef salute the butcher as it throbs to its knees?”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1