Clive Barker > Quotes

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

“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

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

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

“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

“The world was full of brutal fathers and tyrannical mothers, and come to that, cruel and uncaring children. It was the way of things. She couldn’t police the species.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“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