Where Nightmares Come From Quotes

“I write from the dream. I discovered long ago, that to lead a life during the day that is not overwhelmed with writing, the first thing I did was cut my writing time down. When I wake up, I have my coffee and breakfast bar, and go to work. I try to do this before I wake up too much, before the real day shifts into the dream world I have recently left. I work while the ghost of those dreams is still with me. I sit down and write, and as soon as I feel I’ve said what I have to say for the day, I stop working. I do have the goal of managing at least three to five pages a day, but sometimes I manage more. My true work day, not business calls, managing life, but the work and joy of writing, is about three hours. I let the dream decipher itself. And when the edges of it become ragged, I stop.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“and what constitutes the making of a true storyteller; someone who speaks directly to the reader’s dreams with dreams of their own.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“I don’t plot or outline, though I may take a few notes here and there, instead I let my dream world fill up each night with a segment of the story. I do this without worrying about it, or trying to force it, and when I wake up the dream bag is full, and I can go to my writing desk, and dream all over the page.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“May there be a cleansing in your absolution.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“Try to finish everything. You’ll always find your enthusiasm for a project waning as it goes on, and you’ll be tempted by a new idea, but learn to ignore the latter and continue with the former. If you start abandoning work, you set a bad precedent, and establish a pattern for the years to come. And be nice to booksellers: never let them pay for a round.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“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

“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

“I also believe that the effect of such a passage in an uncanny tale depends not just on the selection of language but on its rhythm. I tend to hear that in my head, which is one reason my tales seem to read well aloud. The odd small edit takes care of inadvertent rhyming, an element I dislike: hence “leave the tunnel by the far end and tiptoe up behind him” becomes “leave the tunnel by the far end so as to tiptoe up behind him.” Indeed, even in the present paragraph I originally wrote “one reason why my tales seem to read well aloud.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“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

“Speculative horror has become our generation’s most viable tradition of the passed story.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“No matter how fantastical the story, true life experience gives it credibility. Dropping in elements of your own life, telling bits of detail borrowed from your memory bank, give the reader a feeling of assurance. It’s the old story about how to tell a lie. Don’t make it all up, tell the lie with large dollops of truth. The truth can give foundation to the most outrageous of lies.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From