Clive Barker > Quotes

“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

“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

“At least she wasn’t alone. All she had to do was follow the sound of the music and she’d surely find the music maker, sooner or later. The more of the melody she heard, the more bittersweet it seemed to be. It was the kind of song her grandfather (her mom’s dad, Grandpa O’Donnell) used to sing when she was little. Laments, he called them. “What’s a lament?” she had asked him one day. “A song about the sad things in the world,” he’d told her, his voice tinged with a little of his Irish roots. “Lovers parted, and ships lost at sea, and the world full of loneliness from one end to the other.” “Why’d you want to sing about sad things?” Candy had asked him. “Because any fool can be happy,” he’d said to her. “It takes a man with real heart”—he’d made a fist and laid it against his chest—“to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep. — Robert Frost Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Memories can be treacherous. We all have a hunger to rearrange our histories so as to remember ourselves in the most flattering light.”
― Clive Barker, The Adventures of Mr. Maximillian Bacchus and His Travelling Circus

“It was his old life he dreamt. He stood in the shuttered room that lay between his ears and let the lost days appear on the wall like a lantern show; moments retrieved from some stockpile he hadn’t even known he’d owned. But the scenes that were paraded before him now — these passages from the unfinished book of his life — no longer seemed quite real. It was fiction, that book; or at best momentarily real, when some part of him had leapt from that stale story, and glimpsed the Fugue in waiting.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“And there... he realised that he had a subject, a labour of love that would give him purpose, that would make sense in the senseless academic world. He would not have to let his studies go to hell. He would be the luckiest of men: someone whose private obsessions and public life intersected.”
― Clive Barker, Tonight, Again

“Three is the number of those who do holy work; Two is the number of those who do lover’s work; One is the number of those who do perfect evil Or perfect good. —From the notes of a monk of the Order of St. Oco; his name unknown”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

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

“It was, for a moment, not her who started out between the bars. It was something dredged up from the bottom of the sea. Black eyes swiveling in a gray head. Some primeval genus that viewed him — he knew this to his marrow — with hatred in its bowels.”
― Clive Barker

“I’ve heard writers defend some pretty appalling stuff by arguing that they have an obligation to depict the world as it is, but fiction has no such obligation. It’s not a mirror to reality, it’s a prism. It refracts experience. Also, I think some writers are reluctant to admit that part of their aim is to shock the reader, and that’s a downward spiral. We have, as consumers, become increasingly inured to violence. Most of us are pretty hard to shock.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“but in an instant he had his head on the ground, and oh, the comfort of it. It was like returning to a lover’s bed on a morning of a frost.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Within the space of a few hours the drab house was repainted with light, and fun and love. It made the Yattering sick.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“Certaines étoiles mettent plus de temps que d’autre à apparaître. Le paradoxe est le suivant : plus il fait nuit, plus ces secrets deviennent visibles. Pour finir, ils se déploient dans toute leur splendeur ; et ce sont ces choses même que nous dissimulons, ces choses dont nous avons le plus honte, dont nous nous servons pour nous guider.”
― Clive Barker