Top 100 Clive Barker Quotes
#1. After all, where can the glorious, the goofy, and the god-like stand shoulder to shoulder?
Clive Barker
#2. Perhaps sunlight had always been luminous, and doorways signs of greater passage than that of one room to another. But she'd not noticed it until now.
Clive Barker
#3. Fear is a place where you just tell the truth
Clive Barker
#4. There is in our natures a calamitous hunger for consummation.
Clive Barker
#5. Sometimes nature is even crueller than politics.
Clive Barker
#6. 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
#7. First, my love and thanks to Ben Smith, my Hollywood agent, who has been a true visionary in a job that is often maligned (in this book, for instance)
Clive Barker
#8. I have the normal complement of anxieties, neuroses, psychoses and whatever else - but I'm absolutely nothing special.
Clive Barker
#9. Does the beef salute the butcher as it throbs to it's knees?
Clive Barker
#10. The century's getting old and stale; it needs new tribes.
Clive Barker
#11. I haven't even had a life I could call my own, and you're ready to slot me into the grand design. Well, I don't think I want to go. I want to be my own design.
Clive Barker
#12. That's half of your trouble," muttered the crocodile. "You believe everything's true."
"That's because everything is," replied Mr. Bacchus.
Clive Barker
#13. I dreamt a limitless book,
A book unbound,
Its leaves scattered in fantastic abundance
On every line there was a new horizon drawn,
New heavens supposed;
New states, new souls.
Clive Barker
#14. Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.
Clive Barker
#15. It's only when you've lost someone that you realize the nonsense of that
phrase "It's a small world". It isn't. It's a vast, devouring world, especially if you're alone.
Clive Barker
#16. I don't feel there's any reason to apologise for having a wicked imagination. I think it's important as a maker of fantasy and of horror.
Clive Barker
#17. I have such sights to show you. Soon, you will have answers to questions you have never even dared to ask.
Clive Barker
#19. Sounds to me like those nails are touching too much gray matter.
Clive Barker
#20. In my mind the river flows both ways. Forward, to the explanation of things; to a destination which will justify the agonies of travel. And back, back to a time when the river was real, and those who wandered along its banks had little interest in visions.
Clive Barker
#21. That's fucked," he remarked, sounding a damn sight less nonchalant than he felt.
Clive Barker
#22. But as his years advanced Lewis had seen less and less purpose in distinguishing between fact and fiction.
Clive Barker
#23. Talk of Power and Might would always attract an audience. Lords never went out of fashion.
Clive Barker
#24. Have patience; the lovers will suffer lovers always suffer.
Clive Barker
#25. 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
#26. Meaning is always a latecomer. Beauty and music seduce us first; later ashamed of our own sensuality, we insist on meaning.
Clive Barker
#27. All rising to great place is by a winding stair. - Sir Francis Bacon,
Clive Barker
#28. 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
#29. I swear, the bigger the bully, the smaller the dick.
Clive Barker
#30. Let the mad find wisdom in their madness for the sane, and let the sane be grateful.
Clive Barker
#31. 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
#32. Life was not a reversible commodity. Things passed away, never to return: species, hopes, years.
Clive Barker
#33. ... if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. - Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Clive Barker
#34. What I tried to do is deliver movies that have worked for me more than once.
Clive Barker
#35. 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
#36. He loved getting crucified at the summer and winter solstices," Norma told Harry. Norma listened while the invisible presence added something to this. "He says you should try it, Harry. A crucifixion and a good blow job. Heaven on Earth.
Clive Barker
#37. If you want to look like the people next door, you're probably smothering yourself into your dreams.
Clive Barker
#38. The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.
Clive Barker
#39. We all count the hours. We all look for completion, even if we fear it. We long to be consumed. I long to be consumed.
Clive Barker
#40. ... there's nothing in the world more fun than doing something you're good at.
Clive Barker
#42. Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.
Clive Barker
#43. 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
#44. That's not fair!"
"Life's not fair, Kaspar. You know that. You had a slave for - how long?"
"Twelve years."
"Did you treat him 'fairly'? No, of course not. You beat him when you were in a bad mood, because it made you feel better, and when you felt better you beat him some more.
Clive Barker
#45. Only once did Lori glimpse such an entity, supine on a mattress in the corner of its boudoir. It was naked, corpulent and sexless, its sagging body a motley of dark, oily skin and larval eruptions that seeped phosphorescence, soaking its simple bed.
Clive Barker
#46. Your kind has a supersitious terror of things ugly and broken; you gear that their conditon may somehow infect you.
Clive Barker
#47. Nothing's perfect... because time passes... and the beetle and the worm find their way into everything sooner or later.
Clive Barker
#49. Her mother had always said that women, being more at peace with themselves than men, needed fewer distractions from their hurts.
Clive Barker
#50. 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
#51. If (when) she got back to her typewriter she'd begin these tongue-in-cheek screenplays over from the top, telling them with faith in the tale, not because every fantasy was absolutely true but because no reality ever was.
Clive Barker
#52. We're both thieves, Harvey Swick. I take time. You take lives. But in the end we're the same: both Thieves of Always.
Clive Barker
#53. 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
#54. I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems of death.
Clive Barker
#55. 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
#56. Wherever I go, I will speak of you with love.
Clive Barker
#57. Let the void come, and bring an end to the tyranny of hope.
Clive Barker
#58. True joy is a profound remembering; and true grief the same.
Clive Barker
#59. Perhaps a wiser eye than hers would be able to read tomorrow in tonight's stars, but where was the fun in that? It was better not to know. Better to be alive in the Here and the Now
in this bright, laughing moment
and let the Hours to come take care of themselves.
Clive Barker
#60. You only saw the darkness, Tammy. There was another side to her. I think there always is, don't you? There's always some light in the darkness, somewhere.
Clive Barker
#61. Writing a book is like masturbation, and making a movie is like an orgy.
Clive Barker
#62. She wanted nothing that he could offer her, except perhaps his absence.
Clive Barker
#63. Writing about the unholy is one way of writing about what is sacred.
Clive Barker
#65. Nothing, I had come to believe by the end, was more illusory than the idea of ending.
Clive Barker
#66. The true Wonderland was not like that, he knew. It was as much shadow as sunlight, and its mysteries could only be unveiled when your wits were about used up and your mind close to cracking.
Clive Barker
#67. I don't take accusations of selling out lightly.
Clive Barker
#68. Leavening the flat bread of what we know, with the yeast of what we dream may come to pass.
Clive Barker
#69. Ignorant of the place it had been and blind to where it was headed.
Clive Barker
#70. If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke - Aye, and what then? - S. T. Coleridge, Anima Poetae
Clive Barker
#71. Maybe the man had taken the wrong turning, but at least he'd travelled some extraordinary roads.
Clive Barker
#72. What worth was a man who could not be haunted?
Clive Barker
#73. Watching the ice-floes dance together on the black water.
Clive Barker
#74. In his perversity, or his genius, or both,
Clive Barker
#75. Dawn was close. The weaker stars had already disappeared, and even the brightest were uncertain of themselves.
Clive Barker
#76. Academe was one of the last strongholds of the professional time-waster.
Clive Barker
#77. What did I see? It's no use telling you there are no words. Of course there are words; there are always words. The question is: can I wield them well enough to evoke the power of what I witnessed? That I doubt. But let me do my best.
Clive Barker
#78. Walk with care in dark places, and do not put your faith in anyone who promises you the forgiveness of the Lord or a certain place in Paradise.
Clive Barker
#79. It's always what may not be shown that shows the most. Forbidden words are always the most eloquent.
Clive Barker
#80. Nothing happens carelessly. We're not brought into the world without reason, even though we may never understand the reason. An infant that lives an hour, that dies before it can lay eyes on those who made it, even that soul did not live without purpose: this is my sudden certainty.
Clive Barker
#81. Darkness always had its part to play. Without it, how would we know when we walked in the light? It's only when its ambitions become too grandiose that it must be opposed, disciplined, sometimes - if necessary - brought down for a time. Then it will rise again, as it must.
Clive Barker
#82. With the inevitability of a tongue returning to probe a painful tooth, we come back and back and back again to our fears, sitting to talk them over with the eagerness of a hungry man before a full and steaming plate.
Clive Barker
#83. You must be careful with kindness. It's usually mistaken for weakness by stupid people.
Clive Barker
#84. I was born alive. Isn't that punishment enough?
Clive Barker
#85. Books should make somebody look at how they feel, be honest with themselves.
Clive Barker
#86. No tears, please. It's a waste of good suffering.
Clive Barker
#87. I never want to be the producer that I too often got.
Clive Barker
#88. When, finally, she did sleep, it was the slumber of a watcher and waiter. Light, and full of sighs.
Clive Barker
#89. You could sometimes guide people's opinions, but if they didn't want to buy what you had to sell you could shout yourself hoarse trying to make them do it and it would never work.
Clive Barker
#90. It was bad enough that these creatures had children and art; that they might also have vision was too dangerous a thought to entertain.
Clive Barker
#91. Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself. So August gave way to September and there were few complaints.
Clive Barker
#92. 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
#93. Sooner or later even the most ambitious glutton must crawl away and seek the solace of the vomitorium.
Clive Barker
#94. I've always thought that sex and horror belonged together.
Clive Barker
#95. Witch, do this for me,
Find me a moon
made of longing.
Then cut it sliver thin,
and having cut it,
hang it high
above my beloved's house,
so that she may look up
tonight
and see it,
and seeing it, sigh for me
as I sigh for her,
moon or no moon.
Clive Barker
#96. Those old hypocrites. They talk about killing witches but the Good Book's full of magic. Turning the Nile to blood and parting the Red Sea. What's that if it's not good old-fashioned magic? Want a little water into wine? No trouble! How about raising the dead man Lazarus? Just say the word!
Clive Barker
#97. Help me', he said, like a lost child.
Go to Hell, the room respectfully replied; and for the first time in his life, he knew exactly what that meant.
Clive Barker
#98. I know that I want to bring sex and horror together as I have been able to in my books.
Clive Barker
#99. I can see in your eyes that there's no seam of untapped joy left in you. The best of life has come and gone. Those days when sudden epiphanies swept over you, and you had visions of the rightness of all things and of your place amongst them; they're history. You're in a darker place now.
Clive Barker
#100. I'm a poet,' the young man said, 'And it's my job to remember the sadness of things.
Clive Barker
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