Clive Barker > Quotes

“..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

“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

“Then we realized that your Kind like to make laws. Like to decree what's what, and whether it's good or not. And the world, being a loving thing, and not wishing to disappoint you or distress you, indulges you. Behaves as though your doctrines are in some way absolute.”
― Clive Barker, Weave World

“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

“The question that lay before me, and I had so far failed to answer, was the way these connections might best be expressed. My mind was filled with possibilities but I had no real sense of how all that I knew was arrayed and dispersed; no sense of the pattern.”
― Clive Barker, Galilee

“The whole point about vision is that it's very individual, it's very personal, and it has to be confessional. It has to be something which hurts - the pulling out of it and putting it on the page hurts. Art can be about the individual writer's response to his or her condition, and if that response comes out of a predigested belief about what the audience wants to hear about the writer's condition, then it has no truth, it has no validity. You either write with your own blood or nobody's. Otherwise it's just ink.”
― Clive Barker

“I have such sights to show you. Soon, you will have answers to questions you have never even dared to ask.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“Everywhere, in the wreckage around him, he found evidence to support the same bitter thesis: that he had encountered nothing in his life—no person, no state of mind or body—he wanted sufficiently to suffer even passing discomfort for.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“In moments they would be here — the ones Kircher had called the Cenobites, theologians of the Order of the Gash. Summoned from their experiments in the higher reaches of pleasure, to bring their ageless heads into a world of rain and failure.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Don't bury personal obsessions. Capitalize on them. ``The connection between personal obsession and the work you do is the most important thing.''

-- Be yourself. ``Singularity is what you need.''

-- Avoid self-censorship: ``We are very self-critical in a way that can be very destructive. In our culture there are voices in our head which have taught us to say, `Oh, I wouldn't do that if I were you.' Don't ever think about anybody peering over your shoulder.''

-- Don't be afraid to show off, even if you think, ``I'm very close to making a complete fool of myself.''

-- Don't be afraid to entertain. ``I want to entertain. I don't want to lose people. I feel responsible as I write to give people the best time I can.''

-- ``Love your failures'' instead of beating yourself up over them.

-- ``Learn to love the process'' of writing.

-- Just do it. Barker likes something director Stanley Kubrick said: ``If you want to make a film, pick up a camera.”
― Clive Barker

“Where else can bubble-gum hearts, the dream travellers, the serial killers, and the occasional guest-star from beyond the grave occupy the same space?”
― Clive Barker

“To every hour, its mystery. At dawn, the riddles of life and light. At noon, the conundrums of solidity. At three, in the hum and heat of the day, a phantom moon, already high. At dusk, memory. And at midnight? Oh, then the enigma of time itself; of a day that will never come again passing into history while we sleep.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“She had witnessed in nauseating detail how the human world worked: its rituals of comfort (television, food, religion); its appetite for poison (television, food, religion); and for the monstrous edifices of desire (television, food, religion): she understood them all.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Absolute Midnight

“A sweet slip of a girl like you, why should you have to know anything about the sorrow of the world? You just believe me when I tell you... there's no way to live your life to the full and not have a reason to shed a tear now and again. It's not a bad feeling, child. That's what a lament does. It makes you feel happy to be sad, in a strange way. D'you see?”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

“Life was not a reversible commodity. Things passed away, never to return: species, hopes, years.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“There was little comfort, this voice inside him said, in discovering a mystery at the wellspring of his life so banal his unremarkable mind could readily fathom it. Better, perhaps, to die in doubt, knowing there was some revelation still unfound, than to pursue and possess such a wretched certainty.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“Perhaps the House had heard Harvey wishing for a full moon, because when he and Wendell traipsed upstairs and looked out the landing window, there--hanging between the bare branches of the trees--was a moon as wide and as white as a dead man's smile.”
― Clive Barker, The Thief of Always

“Does the beef salute the butcher as it throbs to it's knees?”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three

“If nothing was worth living for it followed, didn’t it, that there was nothing worth dying for either.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“It was that sleep itself—the act of closing the eyes and relinquishing control of her consciousness—was something she was temperamentally unsuited to.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Born from different parents, they were siblings in death, destroyed by the same hand.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Indifference was the best remedy. Once you conceded defeat, life was a feather bed.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“I'm not afraid," he said. "What's the use of fear? You can't buy it or sell it, you can't make love to it. You can't even wear it if they strip off your shirt and you're cold.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“My books are my confessions.”
― Clive Barker

“We made our choice, he said. We hunted for them, we guarded their brats. God knows, we helped them make a civilization, didn't we? And why?
I said I didn't know; it was beyond me. Because, he said, we thought they knew how to take care of things. How to keep the world full of meat and flowers.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“She had long ago accepted that life was unfair. But why , when she'd accepted the bitter truth , did circumstance insist on rubbing her face in it?”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“The world had seen so many Ages: the Age of Enlightenment; of Reformation; of Reason. Now, at last, the Age of Desire. And after this, an end to Ages; an end, perhaps, to everything.”
― Clive Barker, The Inhuman Condition

“I don't like to make a distinction between the writer and the painter , finally , because I do both things anyway . Everybody's dreaming and trying to put down their dreams in the way that their hand knows best . I feel as much a unity , as much comradeship , with painters as I do writers .”
― Clive Barker

“I don't like PG-13 horror movies. I think they're a contradiction in terms.”
― Clive Barker