Clive Barker > Quotes

“… 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

“It’s best to be prepared for the worst, after all, and wise to learn to walk before breath runs out.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“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

“I know many a strong man undone by marriage.”
― Clive Barker, Tonight, Again

“He looked like a chided child, she thought. Any pretense to machismo had been stripped from him. He was a raw, snotty child. Pathetic and dangerous: the inevitable combination.”
― Clive Barker, The Great And Secret Show

“Each of these parts has a different father and mother, but he assembled me.
The creature was given life eight years earlier in a charnel-house in Prague:
An abattoir and me its fruit, its marvellous boy...I was a clean slate, with no memory of what this brain had been, but I knew my condition. Living corruption, a crowd sewn together in one skin. Anarchy in every limb, and bones that ached to go to dust.”
― Clive Barker

“Now that’s the way a poet should dress,” Lemuel declared when he came back for Cal. “Like a blind thief.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“It wasn’t that she had bad dreams; or at least none that lingered until morning. It was that sleep itself—the act of closing the eyes and relinquishing control of her consciousness—was something she was temperamentally unsuited to.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart: A Great Fall or Halloween Read

“Everywhere, in the wreckage around him, he found evidence to support the same bitter thesis: that he hd encountered nothing in his life—no person, no state of mind or body—he wanted sufficiently to suffer even passing discomfort for.”
― Clive Barker

“Legends are not born or made, they just are.”
― 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. They have signposts, these highways, and bridges and lay-bys. They have turnpikes and intersections. It is at these intersections, where the crowds of dead mingle and cross, that this forbidden highway is most likely to spill through into our world.”
― Clive Barker

“That which can be imagined need never be lost.”
― Clive Barker

“Speculative horror has become our generation’s most viable tradition of the passed story.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“Shrine of the Mortalities.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Try to finish everything. You’ll always find your enthusiasm for a project waning as it goes on, and you’ll be tempted by a new idea, but learn to ignore the latter and continue with the former. If you start abandoning work, you set a bad precedent, and establish a pattern for the years to come. And be nice to booksellers: never let them pay for a round.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“He became aware (was it just his dream life, denied its span in sleepless nights, spreading into wakefulness?) of another world, hovering beyond or behind the facade of reality.”
― Clive Barker

“And when you’re very lucky, a third state comes your way: what I’ll call the ecstatic. It doesn’t happen very often, at least to me, and when it does it never lasts very long, but when it’s gone you know it. What is this state? Damned if I know. I do know that it invariably comes when you least expect it. Suddenly you’re expressing feelings you didn’t know you had, you’re seeing patterns you didn’t know were there to be found, and better still, you find you have the words to express those feelings, those patterns. When it’s over, you come down from the experience feeling tender and vulnerable. But what has happened on the page is somehow new to you, as though another mind has created it. More than once I’ve been tempted to reject or even destroy work I made in this state, motivated by an unhealthy desire to recall the text within the boundaries of what’s recognizably mine.”
― Clive Barker, The Essential Clive Barker: Selected Fiction

“Every love story was - at the last - a story of death; this was what the poets insisted. Why should it be any less true the other way about?”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volumes Four to Six

“The pleasure of the supernatural short story lies in not having to explain anything. They’re just glimpses, a momentary lifting of the veil.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“One part of love is innocence, One part of love is guilt, One part the milk, that in a sense Is soured as soon as spilt, One part of love is sentiment, One part of love is lust, One part is the presentiment Of our return to dust.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Forgive my Art. On bended knees, I do confess: I seek to please.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“[La narrativa horror] ci mostra che il controllo che crediamo di avere è puramente illusorio e che ogni momento vacilliamo nel caos e nell'oblio.”
― Clive Barker