Clive Barker > Quotes

“Make a fist. Lightly. Leave enough room for a breath to pass through. Good. Good. All magic proceeds from breath. Remember that.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“However this miraculous place worked, it seemed real enough. The sun was hot, the soda was cold, the sky was blue, the grass was green. What more did he need to know?”
― 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

“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

“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

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

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

“I was cured in my new infamy of all the tired wisdom of age. I would never weary into that tired state again---I swore to myself, I would always be this raw, wet child hereafter...”
― Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone

“..which should teach you something about this world. That it's a place where whatever you work for and care about is bound to be taken away from you sooner or later, and there isn't a thing you can do about it.”
― Clive Barker