Clive Barker > Quotes

“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

“Most of this is beyond even our comprehension, but we offer you what we know. It’s a spirit. And it once stood guard over a place where magic was. A garden, some have said, though that may be simply another fiction.” “Why should it want to wipe the Seerkind out?” “They were made there, in that garden, kept from the eyes of Humankind, because they had raptures. But they fled from it.” “And Uriel —” “— was left alone, guarding an empty place. For centuries.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“It wasn’t love she felt for him. That was too big a burden of feeling to carry. It was at best infatuation, mingled with that sense of impending loss she always tasted when close to somebody, as though every moment in his presence she was internally mourning the time when he would no longer be there.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“unshooable”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“sick as a flea in a leper’s jock strap.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“way, is music. I hear that longing in countless pieces: in Barber’s Adagio, in the “In Paradisum” from the Fauré Requiem, in the “Liebestod” from Tristan and Isolde; in Max Steiner’s film scores, in folk songs like “Blow the Wind Southerly” and “Shenandoah”
― Clive Barker, The Essential Clive Barker: Selected Fiction

“May there be a cleansing in your absolution.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“If I've learned anything from two decades of fantastique writing it's that the more extraordinary the subject matter the more specific the details need to be.”
― Clive Barker, Incarnations: Three Plays by Clive Barker

“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. He had seen her late at night, her dirty back streets shamelessly courting depravity. He had watched her in the hot afternoon, sluggish and ugly, indifferent to the atrocities that were being committed every hour in her throttled passages.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“I wonder if the reverse is not also in some way true. That the artist is constantly working on an elaborate and fantasticated self-portrait, but at the end has drawn, unbeknown, a picture of the world.”
― Clive Barker, The Essential Clive Barker: Selected Fiction

“Radinka appears as a regular human female, normal in every facet except one: her eyes. She possesses a pair of grotesquely enlarged, almost froglike optical organs, their protruding lenses marring what would be an otherwise-perfect woman's face. These eyes are unique not only in their appearance, however; Radinka can perceive her surroundings only as they were in the past. She has therefore spent the bulk of her life attempting to marry her vision of the past with the messages she receives from her other senses of the present. The Conjuction, as she calls her condition, proves to Radinka beyond a reasonable doubt that reality is, in fact, more than the sum of its parts.”
― Clive Barker, The Nightbreed Chronicles

“For a time he had tried to forget her; it was more convenient that way. Now he clung to thoughts of that face, bereft. He wondered if he would see her again.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“Even today I keep a Dream Journal. It's whatever's going on in my subconscious, or things from dreams or even interesting items that pop into my head. I have thousands of pages of notes which I hope someday will turn into stories, or movies...Being on the road gives me breathing time and the opportunity to think about what to do next. In fact right before I came down for lunch today, I was writing down notes about my feelings. Things that I need to do to keep motivated. I need to be motivated if I am to going to devote fifteen months to writing another book. And I couldn't write a book just because it's a commercial idea. I need to have a compelling reason.”
― Clive Barker

“I dream of broken hearts tonight,
And one of them is mine.
It will not mend with sympathy,
It won't be healed by wine.
The only balm I can concieve
To put the hurt to right,
Would be, my sweat, of you
Were not to live beyond tonight.”
― Clive Barker

“He was telling stories to keep you amused,” said Cal. “He used to like to make stuff up. It was the Irish in him.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Horror fiction tends to be reactionary. It's usually about to return to the status quo -- the monster is the outsider who must be banished from the sanctum. But over and over again, I've created monsters who come from the outside and who call out to somebody to join them in the sanctum.”
― Clive Barker

“A book is dead until you read it.”
― Clive Barker

“Dışarıda, yakınlarda bir yerde, dünya birazdan uyanacaktı. Frank onun uyanmasını, anlamsız hedefler peşinde bir tur daha koşmak üzere kalkmasını tam da bu odanın penceresinden, günler birbirini kovaladıkça seyretmişti... Orada, dışarıda kendisini heyecanlandıracak bir şey kalmadığını çok iyi bilerek. İhtiras yoktu, ter dökmek vardı yalnızca. Tutku yoktu, aniden gelen şehvet vardı yalnızca... Ve bir o kadar ani olan ilgisizlik hissi.”
― Clive Barker, Clive Barker's hellraiser

“Before Rictus could finish Hood took hold of his servant’s head, and with one short motion simply twisted it off. A yellowish cloud of foul-smelling air rose from the severed neck, and Rictus—the last of Hood’s abominable quartet”
― Clive Barker, The Thief of Always

“The inside of my skull is more like a wall upon which decades of posters have been plastered - for circuses, for trials, for vaudevilles and public exorcisms - their images (some garish, some spare) pasted on top of one another. In places, the more recent additions have been torn and gouged away, revealing glimpses of events that have long since passed from view, but whose fragments are here patched with more modern entertainments, creating a sum far weirder than its parts. in others, an image has gathered echoes, and is now surrounded by bizarre puns and riffs upon itself.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellraiser Chronicles

“Magic might be bestowed upon the physical, but it didn’t reside there. It resided in the word, which was mind spoken, and in motion, which was mind made manifest; in the system of the Weave and the evocations of the melody: all mind.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Sometimes there were people beating on the doors to get in and see, but they never did. He belonged to her completely, in all his beauty and his wretchedness.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“It was not an ambitious creature. All it wanted at that moment, beyond any other dream, was to take this human’s skull between its palms and make a nonsense of it. Crush it to smithereens, and pour the hot thought out on to the snow. To be done with Jack J. Polo, forever and forever. Was that so much to ask?”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“I saw the heart of nothing, and survived.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volume Three

“She felt their perversity as a quality of the air. She breathed it in and out. It scoured her lungs and hurried her heart.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“As much as you feel as though you need to find some relevant bit of information for your story to work, research distracts from your writing and inevitably leads you down a rabbit hole of websites and articles and, more than likely, the temptation of checking your email or your Facebook profile or the baseball scores on ESPN.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“this is why men go underground. To remember why they live in the sun.”
― Clive Barker, The Great And Secret Show

“I keep a bedside journal. I am very affected by dream information. They might be scary to other people, but they're mine, so they don't feel scary. I'd wake up in a cold sweat if I didn't dream these things...”
― Clive Barker

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

“Handwriting everything, for me, is psychologically useful because it keeps my writing economical. I think there are word processor styles emerging. Something does seem to happen to a writer's style when he works on a word processor. When you hand write a thing the size of Weaveworld (584 pages) you want to make sure every word counts because it's such a huge labour to get it down.”
― Clive Barker