Clive Barker > Quotes

“Well, it was most likely too late; there would not be time for me to flagellate myself for every dishonorable deed in that list, nor any chance to make good the harms I’d done. Minor harms, to be sure, in the scheme of things; but large enough to regret.”
― Clive Barker, Galilee

“At best you can hold death at bay, you can pretend it isn't there; but to deny it totally is a sickness. And I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems, and, perversely perhaps, to enjoy a vicarious confrontation with them.”
― Clive Barker

“Minds weren't pictures at an exhibition, all numbered, and hung in order of influence, one marked "Cunning," the next, "Impressionable." They were scrawls; they were sprawling splashes of graffiti, unpredictable, unconfinable.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“It’s all part of the dance, she thought; the dust, her hands, the light that was spiraling around her: it’s all part of the same wonderful dance. And I’m in it.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

“How many human eyes ...
had snatched glimpses of their secret anatomies, down the passage of years?”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volumes 1-6

“I'm a poet,' the young man said, 'And it's my job to remember the sadness of things.”
― Clive Barker, Beneath The Surface of Clive Barker's Abarat

“Hopelessness is reasonable. But nothing of worth in my life came of reason. Not my love, not my art, not my heaven. So I am hopeful”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Absolute Midnight

“Let the mad find wisdom in their madness for the sane, and let the sane be grateful."
"Is that a famous saying?"
"Maybe if I say it often enough.”
― Clive Barker

“Never a truer word said or thought. Anything was possible.”
― Clive Barker, The Great and Secret Show

“Hell is reimagined by each generation. Its terrain is surveyed for absurdities and remade in a fresher mold; its terrors are scrutinized and, if necessary, reinvented to suit the current climate of atrocity; its architecture is redesigned to appall the eye of the modern damned.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“The Devil is by no means the worst that there is; I would rather have dealings with him than with many a human being. He honours his agreements much more promptly than many a swindler on Earth. To be true, when payment is due he comes on the dot; just as twelve strikes, fetches his soul and goes off home to Hell like a good Devil. He’s just a businessman as is right and proper. —-J.N. NESTROY, Hollenangst”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“I have the normal complement of anxieties, neuroses, psychoses and whatever else - but I'm absolutely nothing special.”
― Clive Barker

“The flawlessly beautiful were flawlessy happy, weren't they? To Kristy this had always seemed self-evident. Tonight, however, the alcohol made her wonder if envy hadn't blinded her. Perhaps to be flawless was another kind of sadness.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“We're living; but we impersonate the dead better than the dead themselves.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 6

“Kaufman almost smiled at the perfection of its horror. He felt an offer of insanity tickling the base of his skull, tempting him into oblivion, promising a blank indifference to the world.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume One

“I've never worked where it was hard to be gay. Besides, being gay is a spectacular irrelevance to getting on with your life.”
― Clive Barker

“Hell was easy; romance was hard.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“There was pain without hope of healing. There was life that refused to end, long after the mind had begged the body to cease. And worst, there were dreams come true.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volumes 1-3

“Love makes its demands, and you listen. You can't bargain with it. You can't fight it. Not if it's really love.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

“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.” Eight lines, and it was all over;”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“the scent of sweet cherry had attracted hundreds of ants. They were crawling over it and into it, many drowning for their greed.”
― Clive Barker, The Thief of Always

“I’ve spent my creative life so far first in the theatre, then on the page, then on the screen, examining what is turning out as I grow older to look like one enormous landscape.

What I originally thought were different worlds turn out to be one interconnected place. And like a bedspread viewed by a sick child from his pillow, I am very aware that there are colours in various corners which I know very well, but I haven’t yet found the ways to get from the blue to the green and from the green to the red.

I’ve just begun, and I suppose that’s become my preoccupation – the idea that at one point I will see it clearly.”
― Clive Barker, Liverpool Lives

“Anyway, it's gone. And there's nothing left in my pocket to charm you. So from now on it's going to have to be tears or nothing I'm afraid.
That's all I've got left to tell you see: tears, tears, tears.”
― Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone

“You have to taste the sour urine before you break the jug.”
― Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone

“Zombies are the liberal nightmare. Here you have the masses, whom you would love to love, appearing at your front door with their faces falling off; and you’re trying to be as humane as you possibly can, but they are, after all, eating the cat. And the fear of mass activity, of mindlessness on a national scale, underlies my fear of zombies.”
― Clive Barker

“He was to be their page, their book, the vessel for their autobiographies. A book of blood. A book made of blood. A book written in blood.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“Her gaze went with her, into a room with walls of frozen earth, and a floor the same, the latter split from corner to corner, and a fissure opened in it from which a flame column rose four or five times the size of a man. There was bitter cold off it rather than heat, and no reassuring flicker in its heart. Instead its innards churned upon themselves, turning over and over some freight of stuff which she failed to recognize at first, but her appalled stare rapidly interpreted. There was a body in the fire, hacked limb from limb, human enough that she recognized it as flesh, but no more than that. Baphomet's doing presumably, some torment visited on a transgressor. Boone said the Baptizer's name even now, and she readied herself for sight of its face. She had it too, but from inside the flame, as the creature there--not dead, but alive, not Midian's subject, but its creator--rolled its head over in the turmoil of flame and looked her way. This was Baphomet. This diced and divided thing. Seeing its face, she screamed. No story or movie screen, no desolation, no bliss, had prepared her for the maker of Midian. Sacred it must be, as anything so extreme must be sacred. A thing beyond things. Beyond love or hatred or their sum, beyond the beautiful or the monstrous or their sum. Beyond, finally, her mind's power to comprehend or catalog.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“What did it matter, anyway, he thought, whether this was a real place or a dream? It felt real, and that was all that mattered.”
― Clive Barker, The Thief of Always

“This is a forsaken place...I can think of no use for a place like this, except that you could say of it: I saw the heart of nothing, and survived.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three

“After all, where can the glorious, the goofy, and the god-like stand shoulder to shoulder?”
― Clive Barker