Clive Barker Quotes:

We are all our own graveyards, I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Mar 06, 2013

Topics: Believe, Past, People, Celebrate Life, Day Of The Dead

I don't like PG-13 horror movies. I think they're a contradiction in terms.

Topics: Thinking, Horror, Contradiction

She had opened a door... and now she was walking with demons. And at the end of her travels, she would have her revenge... Pain had made a ***** of her.

Topics: Pain, Revenge, Doors

A monster lies in wait in me,a stew of wounds and misery.But fiercer still in life and limb,the me that lies in wait in him

Topics: Lying, Waiting, Monsters

You cut up a thing that's alive and beautiful to find out how it's alive and why it's beautiful, and before you know it, it's neither of those things, and you're standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it.

source: - Clive Barker (1999). “The essential Clive Barker: selected fictions”

Topics: Beautiful, Cutting, Sight, Standing There

Everything is in flux: everything changes; the body changes, the soul changes. We are capable of extraordinary self-transmutat ion and internal self-transforma tion.

Topics: Self, Ions, Soul, Transmutation, Body Change

I firmly believe that a story is only as good as the villain.

Topics: Believe, Stories, Villain

To dream in isolation can be properly splendid to be sure; but to dream in company seems to me infinitely preferable.

Topics: Dream, Isolation, Splendid

..She had that brand of pragmatism that would find her the first brewing tea after Armageddon.

Topics: Tea, Firsts, Armageddon, Pragmatism

[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.

Topics: Life, Believe, Scary

I want to be remembered as an imaginer, someone who used his imagination as a way to journey beyond the limits of self, beyond the limits of flesh and blood, beyond the limits of even perhaps life itself, in order to discover some sense of order in what appears to be a disordered universe. I'm using my imagination to find meaning, both for myself and, I hope, for my readers."-Clive Barker

source: - Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

Topics: Journey, Self, Blood

any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

source: - Twitter post from Aug 14, 2015

Topics: Love, Sad, Art, Good Heart, Big Heart

Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Jul 28, 2013

Topics: Halloween, Book, Equality, Horror Genre

Nothing else wounds so deeply and irreparably. Nothing else robs us of hope so much as being unloved by one we love

Topics: Love, Unloved, Wounds, Abarat, Being Unloved

I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories. This is a gift from God, who spoke our species into being, but left the end of our story untold. That mystery is troubling to us. How could it be otherwise? Without the final part, we think, how are we to make sense of all that went before: which is to say, our lives? So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.

Topics: Men, Thinking, Animal

Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any story springs. The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator's voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.

source: - Clive Barker (2001). “Weaveworld”, p.7, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Spring, Voice, Age

Evil, however powerful it seemed,could be undone by its own appetite

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Feb 08, 2013

Topics: Powerful, Evil, Undone

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.

Topics: Fall, Cat, Doors, Falling Off, Front Doors

You just have to trust your own madness.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Nov 13, 2012

Topics: Hate, Madness, I Hate You

Sooner or later even the most ambitious glutton must crawl away and seek the solace of the vomitorium.

Topics: Ambitious, Solace, Sooner Or Later

Believe me, when I say; There are no two powers That command the soul. One is God The other is the tide. -Anon From the novel Abarat

Topics: Believe, Two, Soul, Anon, Abarat

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.

Topics: Thinking, Design, Want

Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.

Topics: Spring, Writing, Stories

Let the mad find wisdom in their madness for the sane, and let the sane be grateful.

Topics: Grateful, Mad, Sane

That which is imagined can never be lost.

source: - Twitter post from Mar 18, 2014

Topics: Lost

Sung to the tune of O Christmas Tree O woe is me, O woe is me, I used to have a hamster tree, But it was eaten by a newt, And now I have no cuddly fruit, O woe is me, O woe is me, I used to have a hamster tree!

Topics: Tree, Tunes, Woe, Woe Is Me, Hamsters

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.

Topics: Thinking, Fiction, Way, Vicarious

All things are true. God's an Astronaut. Oz is Over the Rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters live." - Peloquin

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Sep 03, 2013

Topics: Rainbow, Monsters, Horror, True God

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.

Topics: Dark, Promise, Care, Dark Places

There is no such thing as originality. It has all been said before, suffered before. If a person knows that, is it any wonder love becomes mechanical and death just a scene to be shunned? There is no absolute knowledge to be gained from either. Just another ride on the merry-go-round, another blurred scene of faces smiling and faces grieved.

source: - Jacob Bronowski (1976). “The ascent of man”

Topics: Faces, Originality, Wonder, Wonder Love, Merry Go Round

I've learned two things in my life. One that love is the beginning and end of all meaning. And two that it is the same thing whatever shape our souls have taken on this journey. Love is love. Is love.

Topics: Taken, Journey, Love Is, Beginnings And Ends, Love Journey

We are the star and the darkness it peirces

Topics: Stars, Darkness

Have patience; the lovers will suffer lovers always suffer.

Topics: Suffering, Lovers, Having Patience

The moon had risen behind him, the color of a shark's underbelly. It lit the ruined walls, and the skin of his arms and hands, with its sickly light, making him long for a mirror in which to study his face. Surely he'd be able to see the bones beneath the meat; the skull gleaming the way his teeth gleamed when he smiled. After all, wasn't that what a smile said? Hello, world, this is the way I'll look when the wet parts are rotted.

Topics: Wall, Moon, Color

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

Topics: Goofy, Shoulders, Glorious

‎"Magic is the first and last religion of the world. It has the power to make us whole, to open our eyes to the Dominions and return us to ourselves. Everything that isn't us is also ourselves. We're joined to everything that was, is and will be. From one end of the Imajica to another. From the tiniest mote dancing over this flame to the Godhead Itself.

Topics: Eye, Flames, Dancing

Fear is a place where you just tell the truth

Topics: Telling The Truth

But I think humans are innately religious as a species, so you don't need a specific excuse for examining the perversely unholy.

Topics: Religious, Thinking, Needs, Examining

All I ever wanted to do is darken the day and brighten the night

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Nov 04, 2012

Topics: Night, Wanted

Make your own worlds. Make your own laws. Make your own creations, your own star systems. Don't feel answerable to anyone, or as though you have to create after some preordained model. You don't have to write like myself, or King or Anne Rice: be yourself. Nothing is more wonderful than discovering a new voice, particularly if it happens to be your own.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from May 19, 2013

Topics: Being Yourself, Kings, Stars, My Own World

I've always thought that the most extraordinary special effect you could do is to buy a child at the moment of its birth, sit it on a little chair and say, "You'll have three score years and ten," and take a photograph every minute. "And we'll watch you and photograph you for ten years after you die, then we'll run the film." Wouldn't that be extraordinary? We'd watch this thing get bigger and bigger, and flower to become extraordinary and beautiful, then watch it crumble, decay, and rot.

Topics: Beautiful, Running, Children

I was a weird little kid. I was very irritable, bored, frustrated. I felt my imagination bubbling inside my head without having any way to express itself. Given a crayon and paper, I would not draw a train or a house. I would draw these monsters, beasts and demons.

Topics: Kids, Bored, Imagination

My imagination is my polestar; I steer by that.

Topics: Imagination, My Imagination

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.

Topics: Beautiful, Eye, People, Goya

Journey to the end of day, Come the fire-fly, Come the moon; Say a prayer for God's good grace And sleep with lore upon your face.

Topics: Prayer, Sleep, Moon

O little one, My little one, Come with me, Your life is done. Forget the future, Forget the past. Life is over: Breathe your last.

Topics: Past, Done, Littles

Three is the number of those who do holy work; Two is the number of those who do lover's work; One is the number of those who do perfect evil Or perfect good.

Topics: Two, Numbers, Evil

Welcome to the worst nightmare of all, reality!

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Feb 08, 2013

Topics: Reality, Welcome, Nightmare, Worst Nightmares

Often people who are wonderful with animals aren't always terribly good with human beings.

Topics: Animal, People, Wonderful

You are my beauty, my body, perfected. All I was drained off into you. When you left, my health went with you - leaving a moral morbidity I smell in my sleep. The acts I committed for the love of you. Acts I can never forget. I crawled into the bellies of the dead to fish out a little life... I have an appetite for it now. I have an unrelenting lust for death.

Topics: Sleep, Smell, Leaving, Unrelenting, Morbidity

A soul of water a soul of stone. A soul by name a soul unknown. The hours unmake our flesh our bone. The Soul is all and all alone!

Topics: Names, Water, Soul

The great grey beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.

Topics: Alive, February, Beast

Harvey wasn't interested in the clothes, it was the masks that mesmerized him. They were like snowflakes: no two alike. Some were made of wood and of plastic; some of straw and cloth and papier-mâché. Some were as bright as parrots, others as pale as parchment. Some were so grotesque he was certain they'd been carved by crazy people; others so perfect they looked like the death masks of angels. There were masks of clowns and foxes, masks like skulls decorated with real teeth, and one with carved flames instead of hair.

Topics: Crazy, Real, Angel, Mesmerized

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

Topics: Love, Dust, Lust

There is no delight the equal of dread

Topics: Delight, Equal, Dread

There must still be room for the falling note, of course. Even in an undying world there are times when beauty passes from sight, or love passes from the heart, and we feel the sorrow of partition.

Topics: Fall, Heart, Sight, Partition

Give me B movies or give me death!

Topics: Giving, Cinematography

Well, here he was. They could save each other, the way the poets promised lovers should. He was mystery, he was darkness, he was all she had dreamed of. And if she would only free him he would service her - oh yes - until her pleasure reached that threshold that, like all thresholds, was a place where the strong grew stronger, and the weak perished. Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa. And he knew it well enough to call it home.

Topics: Strong, Pain, Home

No tears, please. It's a waste of good suffering.

Topics: Suffering, Tears, Waste

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.

Topics: Men, Teeth, Sitting, Hungry Man

She was a sea: and I had to swim in her.

Topics: Sea, Swim

Whatever capacity she possesses to supernaturally beguile a human soul—and she possesses many—she liked his clear-sightedness too well, to blind him that way.

Topics: Soul, Way, Blind

A man kills the thing he loves, and he must die a little himself.

Topics: Men, Littles

Writing about the unholy is one way of writing about what is sacred.

Topics: Life, Writing, Sacred

Mischief nodded. 'It's true,' he conceded. 'You're in the company of eight world-class thieves,' he said, not without a little touch of pride. 'Saints we are not.' But then,' said Deaux-Deaux, 'who is?' he thought on this. 'Besides saints.

Topics: Pride, Eight, Class

Did I say that she was beautiful? I was wrong. Beauty is too tame a notion; it evokes only faces in magazines. A lovely eloquence, a calming symmetry; none of that describes this woman’s face. So perhaps I should assume I cannot do it justice with words. Suffice it to say that it would break your heart to see her; and it would mend what was broken in the same moment; and you would be twice what you’d been before.

Topics: Beautiful, Heart, Broken

Memory, prophecy, and fantasy— The past, the future, and The dreaming moment between— Are all in one country, Living one immortal day. To know that is Wisdom. To use it is the Art.

source: - "Everville". Book by Clive Barker, www.e-reading.club. 1994.

Topics: Dream, Country, Art

Horror fiction shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.

source: - "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

Topics: Life, Believe, Scary

True joy is a profound remembering; and true grief the same.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Nov 21, 2012

Topics: Grief, True Joy, Profound

Study nothing except in the knowledge that you already knew it. Worship nothing except in adoration of your true self. And fear nothing except in the certainty that you are your enemy's begetter and its only hope of healing.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Sep 02, 2013

Topics: Healing, Self, Enemy

She wanted nothing that he could offer her, except perhaps his absence.

source: - Clive Barker (1991). “The Hellbound Heart”, Voyager

Topics: Absence, Wanted, Offers

Your flesh is killing your spirit. You have forsaken yourself.

Topics: Flesh, Spirit, Killing

Funny that. We live in islands of Hours and we never seem to have time enough for anything.

Topics: Islands, Hours, Enough

Flesh could not keep its glamour, nor eyes their sheen. They would go to nothing soon. But monsters are forever.

Topics: Eye, Forever, Monsters

We’re too much ourselves. Afraid of letting go of what we are, in case we are nothing, and holding on so tight, we lose everything else.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Oct 21, 2012

Topics: Letting Go, Too Much, Holding On

Of course it’s the apparently tranquil periods that deceive us. Though our instruments or our senses or our wits may not be able to see the processes that are leading toward these clusters of events, they’re happening. The star, the wheel, the butterfly—all are in a subtle state of unrest, waiting for the moment when some invisible mechanism signals that the time has come. Then the star explodes; the wheel makes poor men rich; the butterfly mates and dies.

source: - "Galilee". Book by Clive Barker, February 3, 1999.

Topics: Stars, Butterfly, Men, Mechanism, Clusters

I dreamed I spoke in another's language, I dreamed I lived in another's skin, I dreamed I was my own beloved, I dreamed I was a tiger's kin. I dreamed that Eden lived inside me, And when I breathed a garden came, I dreamed I knew all of Creation, I dreamed I knew the Creator's name. I dreamed--and this dream was the finest-- That all I dreamed was real and true, And we would live in joy forever, You in me, and me in you.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Mar 13, 2014

Topics: Dream, Real, Garden

You must be careful with kindness. It's usually mistaken for weakness by stupid people.

Topics: Kindness, Stupid, People

Wherever I go, I will speak of you with love.

source: - Clive Barker (1992). “The thief of always: a fable”, Harpercollins

Topics: Speak

The monsters act out our rage. They act on their worst impulses, which is appealing to a certain part of us. They get punished for it, but we've enjoyed the spectacle of their liberation.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Jan 06, 2013

Topics: Monsters, Rage, Certain

We burn so hard, but we shed so little light; it makes us crazy and sad.

source: - "Galilee". Book by Clive Barker, February 3, 1999.

Topics: Crazy, Light, Littles

I remember when I watched 'Hellraiser' with my mother. She cried when she saw my name in the opening credits, and I had to tell her that that was the happiest she was going to be for the next two hours.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Nov 05, 2012

Topics: Mother, Names, Two

being with people makes me vomit. I don't like em. I never did.

source: - Clive Barker (2010). “Sacrament”, p.19, HarperCollins UK

Topics: People, Ems

‎"Magic is the first and last religion of the world. It has the power to make us whole, to open our eyes to the Dominions and return us to ourselves. Everything that isn't us is also ourselves. We're joined to everything that was, is and will be. From one end of the Imajica to another. From the tiniest mote dancing over this flame to the Godhead Itself.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Dec 03, 2012

Topics: Eye, Flames, Dancing

Here is a list of terrible things, The jaws of sharks, a vultures wings The rabid bite of the dogs of war, The voice of one who went before, But most of all the mirror's gaze, Which counts us out our numbered days.

Topics: Dog, Fear, War, Dogs Of War, Vulture

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.

source: - Clive Barker (1984). “Clive Barker's Books of Blood: Volumes One, Two and Three”

Topics: Phrases, World, Realizing, Lost Someone, Small World

…there’s nothing in the world more fun than doing something you’re good at.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Mar 06, 2013

Topics: Fun, World

Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise. Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for something to quench its heat, and the mellowest of autumns will tire of gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its fruitfulness. Even winter — the hardest season, the most implacable — dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.

source: - Clive Barker (1991). “The Hellbound Heart”, Voyager

Topics: Summer, Dream, Spring, Fruitfulness, Gentility

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!

Topics: Book, Wine, Hypocrite, Lazarus, Red Sea

We each die countless little deaths on our way to the last. We die out of shame as humiliation. We perish from despair. And, of course, we die for love.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Mar 13, 2014

Topics: Despair, Littles, Way

Gather experience... Look at what you should not look at. A feeling of anxiety is the sure and certain evidence that you should do this.

Topics: Anxiety, Feelings, Looks

One of the things I'm trying to do over and over again in my books is create new mythologies, create new ways to understand the complexity of the world. I think what mythology does is impress upon chaotic experience the patterns, hierarchies and shapes which allow us to interpret the chaos and make fresh sense of it.

Topics: Book, Thinking, Trying

We always think we are right, and - search as I have - there is no evil under the sun that somebody somewhere won't argue is actually a good, no idiocy that hasn't got its perfectly serious defenders, and no tyrant, past or present - no matter how bloody - without some bunch of zealot schmucks to defend him or his reputation till the last breath in their bodies - or preferably somebody else's.

Topics: Past, Thinking, Tyrants, Zealot, Schmucks

Of all the rash and midnight promises made in the name of love, none, Boone now knew, was more certain to be broken than "I'll never leave you.

source: - Clive Barker (2001). “Cabal”, p.5, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Names, Broken, Promise

You’ve always got me” “Always?” “Didn’t I just say so?” “Yes” “Am I liar? “ “No.” I lied.

Topics: Liars, Lied

Richard Christian Matheson is a master of compression. He knows how to catch a moment in words and convey it straight to the reader's heart.

Topics: Christian, Heart, Moments, Compression

Mutilation is the badge that can never be taken off, and sets us apart from all others. Pain is important to the bonding-a physical horror that bonds us ever tighter to all those who have partaken. The intensity of the experience helps to widen the gulf between us and those who have not shared.

Topics: Pain, Taken, Important, Mutilation, Self Injury

My life is in the art that I make, and I'm very happy with it.

Topics: Art, Life Is, Very Happy

..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.

source: - Clive Barker (2009). “Mister B. Gone”, p.12, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Taken, World, Care

To call you excrement would be an insult to the product of my bowels.

Topics: Would Be, Insult, Bowels

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.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Mar 12, 2014

Topics: Ambition, Play, Light, Grandiose, Abarat

The sun rose like a stripper, keeping its glory well covered by cloud till it seemed there'd be no show at all.

source: - Clive Barker (2001). “Cabal”, p.109, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Clouds, Rose, Sun

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.

source: - Clive Barker (2001). “The Inhuman Condition”, p.164, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Age, Desire, Enlightenment, Age Of Enlightenment

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.

source: - Clive Barker (2010). “Galilee”, p.55, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Regret, Too Late, Done, Dishonorable

I'm a poet,' the young man said, 'And it's my job to remember the sadness of things.

Topics: Jobs, Sadness, Men

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.

Topics: Eye, Joy, Over You

It is great good health to believe as the Hindus do that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one s dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical. It is sickness of the profoundest kind to believe that there is one reality. There is sickness in any piece of work or any piece of art seriously attempting to suggest that the idea that there is more than one reality is somehow redundant.

Topics: Dream, Art, Believe, Redundant, Gods And Goddesses

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.

Topics: Art, Hurt, Writing

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.

Topics: Cutting, Moon, House, Abarat

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.

source: - "Abarat: The First Book of Hours". Book by Clive Barker, 2002.

Topics: Stars, Fun, Eye

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.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Oct 22, 2012

Topics: Eye, Soul, Purpose

It was as though in these last minutes together - when they had so much to say - they could say nothing of the least significance, for fear it open the floodgates.

source: - "The Damnation Game". Book by Clive Barker, 1985.

Topics: Together, Lasts, Minutes, Last Minute

I love meeting people who've read my books. The prime reason to be on the planet is to make things I can show to other people: paintings, books, movies.

Topics: Book, People, Painting

Behind their eyes the hope was sickening and in many, dead. They lived from event to event with a subtle terror of the gap between, filling up their lives with distractions to avoid the emptiness where curiosity should have been.

source: - Clive Barker (1996). “The Great and Secret Show: The First Book of the Art”

Topics: Eye, Filling Up, Should Have

I've always thought that sex and horror belonged together.

source: - "Clive Barker Speaks Out on Midnight Meat Train". Interview with Brian Gallagher, movieweb.com. February 16, 2009.

Topics: Sex, Together, Horror

Midian is where the monsters go.

source: - "Nightbreed". www.imdb.com. 1990.

Topics: Monsters

I really believe that there is an enormous appetite amongst readers for an originality of vision. In other words, be true to your own dreams and there will always be people who want to hear them.

Topics: Dream, Believe, People

Writing a book is like masturbation, and making a movie is like an orgy.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Aug 04, 2013

Topics: Book, Writing, Masturbation

Words are sexier than flesh.

Topics: Flesh

I know that I want to bring sex and horror together as I have been able to in my books.

source: - "Clive Barker Speaks Out on Midnight Meat Train". Interview with Brian Gallagher, movieweb.com. February 16, 2009.

Topics: Sex, Book, Together

There’s no conscious thing on the face of the world that doesn’t know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Feb 21, 2013

Topics: World, Faces, Heartbeat

There are things that are more important than the news and what’s happening today. There are these archetypes which are part of the human imagination since humans were presumably imaginative. And I think that’s what [people] find touching, these eternal ideas. It’s one of the things that makes fantasy something that tends to stand the test of time because we’re reading, 50 years later, The Lord of the Rings.

Topics: Reading, Thinking, Ideas, Test Of Time

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

Topics: Psychosis, Anxiety, Special, Complement, Absolutely Nothing

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 .

Topics: Dream, Hands, Unity

Always, worlds within worlds.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from May 20, 2013

Topics: World

She's...just a girl, you know. Like most girls: something and nothing.

Topics: Girl, Just A Girl, Knows

What I tried to do is deliver movies that have worked for me more than once.

Topics: Literature

If you want to look like the people next door, you're probably smothering yourself into your dreams.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from May 14, 2013

Topics: Dream, Doors, People

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.

source: - Clive Barker (2011). “Abarat”, p.11, Harper Collins

Topics: Book, Heaven, Soul, Unbound

Superman is, after all, an alien life form. He is simply the acceptable face of invading realities.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from May 14, 2013

Topics: Reality, Criminals, Alien Life, Invading, Best Criminal Minds

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.

Topics: Children, Tired, Age, Infamy

I've held a brain in my hands, which is an extraordinary experience.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Jan 07, 2013

Topics: Hands, Brain, Extraordinary

If we have nothing to do but service our own pleasure - because society has taught us that's all we're worth and we're exiled from positions of authority from which we could actually shape society - then we just become hedonists. Eventually, despite how great it may look on Saturday night, come Monday morning there's just purposelessness.

source: - "Lord of ILLUSION". Interview with Charles lsherwood, www.clivebarker.com. February 21, 1995.

Topics: Monday, Morning, Night, Purposelessness, Hedonist

For a writer, and particularly a writer of my genre, which is the fantastical, I think that it's to my advantage to feel remote from and disconnected from the world of deal making.

Topics: Thinking, World, Advantage

How many human eyes...had snatched glimpses of their secret anatomies, down the passage of years?

Topics: Eye, Years, Secret

You can plan to be brave - it's even better if you just try to be brave.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Apr 17, 2013

Topics: Bravery, Trying, Literature

I'm a great dog fanatic. My own dog died a little while ago and I take it very personally when things die-it's a major offence.

Topics: Dog, Loss, Animal, Offence, Dog Died

We're both thieves, Harvey Swick. I take time. You take lives. But in the end we're the same: both Thieves of Always.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Feb 03, 2013

Topics: Thieves, Ends, Take Time

The extraordinary's the norm.

source: - Clive Barker (2011). “The Great and Secret Show”, p.32, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Norm, Extraordinary

Why'd you want to sing about sad things?" Candy had asked him. "Because any fool can be happy," he'd said to her. "It takes a man with real heart" —he'd made a fist and laid it against his chest— "to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

Topics: Real, Heart, Men, Real Heart

You'll learn, honey. Love can be the best thing in life. And it can be the worst. The absolute worst.

source: - Clive Barker (2011). “Abarat”, p.26, Harper Collins

Topics: Things In Life, Honey, Being The Best

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.

Topics: Tears, Pockets, Gone

Leavening the flat bread of what we know, with the yeast of what we dream may come to pass.

source: - "Abarat". Book by Clive Barker, September 1, 2002.

Topics: Dream, May, Yeast

Angels have very nasty tempers. Especially when they’re feeling righteous.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Apr 19, 2013

Topics: Angel, Feelings, Nasty

One man's pornography is another man's theology.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Apr 21, 2013

Topics: Men, Theology, Pornography

My father used to say: Every bird is one bird, and every book is one book, and every bird and every book is one thing too, under the words and the feathers." He finished with a flourish, as though the meaning of this was self-evident.

source: - Clive Barker (2010). “Everville”, p.41, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Father, Book, Self

To you who have never died, may I say: Welcome to the world!

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Mar 15, 2013

Topics: Funny, Death, Dying

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

Topics: Gay, Irrelevance, Spectacular

There are lives lived for love, and lives lived for art. We, happy band, have chosen the later persuasion.

source: - FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Nov 02, 2012

Topics: Art, Life And Love, Band

Life is short And pleasures few And holed the ship And drowned the crew But o! But o! How very blue the sea is.

source: - Clive Barker (2011). “Abarat”, p.11, Harper Collins

Topics: Life Is Short, Blue, Sea

What worth was a man who could not be haunted?

source: - Clive Barker (2001). “In the Flesh”, p.82, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Men

Maybe the man had taken the wrong turning, but at least he'd travelled some extraordinary roads.

source: - Clive Barker (2015). “Weaveworld”, p.279, Crossroad Press

Topics: Taken, Men, Extraordinary

My feet are killing me." "I knew somebody who had feet like that. They'd walk all over him. Archie Kashanian was his name. He used to wake up with footprints all over his chest, all over his face. It was the death of him, finally.

source: - "Abarat". Book by Clive Barker, September 1, 2002.

Topics: Feet, Names, Wake Up

You have to taste the sour urine before you break the jug.

Topics: Jugs, Taste, Break

Never believe your eyes

source: - Clive Barker (1989). “Cabal”, Pocket

Topics: Believe, Eye

Keep it simple. Trust your imagination. Discover what is unique about your imagination. Don't simply read a story and copy it. I go into myself. Then I transcribe what visions I have. If those ideas are original, and you are devoted, you will go far.

Topics: Unique, Simple, Ideas

By and large I think art is made by people who have discipline married to talent in sufficiently large amounts to work even if they don't feel like it. Anybody can get maudlin and decide to write poetry at 11 at night; the question is, can you do it at 8:30 on a Monday morning..?

Topics: Art, Monday, Morning

His body and his mind went about their different businesses. The former, freed from conscious instruction, breathed, rolled, sweated, and digested. The latter went dreaming.

source: - Clive Barker (2010). “Imajica”, p.82, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Dream, Mind, Different

In this sense love is of a different order to any other phenomenon, for it may be both an event and a sign of that invisible mechanism I spoke of before; perhaps the finest sign, the most certain. In it’s throes we need neither luck nor science. We are the wheel, and the man who profits by it. We are the star, and the darkness it pierces. We are the butterfly, brief and beautiful.

source: - "Galilee". Book by Clive Barker, February 3, 1999.

Topics: Beautiful, Stars, Butterfly, Mechanism

And in time it will be as though men had never come to this perfect corner of the world-never called it paradise on earth, never despoiled it with their dream factories; and in the golden hush of the afternoon all that will be heard will be the flittering of dragonflies, and the murmur of hummingbirds as they pass from bower to bower, looking for a place to sup sweetness.

Topics: Dream, Men, Paradise On Earth, Dragonflies, Corners Of The World

We have great cities to visit: New York and Washington, Paris and London; and further east, and older than any of these, the legendary city of Samarkand, whose crumbling palaces and mosques still welcome travelers on the Silk road. Weary of cities? Then we’ll take to the wilds. To the islands of Hawaii and the mountains of Japan, to forests where Civil War dead still lie, and stretches of sea no mariner ever crossed. They all have their poetry: the glittering cities and the ruined, the watery wastes and the dusty; I want to show you them all. I want to show you everything.

source: - "Galilee". Book by Clive Barker, February 3, 1999.

Topics: New York, War, Lying, Mariners, Samarkand

I don't take accusations of selling out lightly.

source: - "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

Topics: Selling, Accusation, Selling Out

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.

Topics: Doorways, Rooms, Sunlight

As for theatre, there's ups and downs to everything. Theatre is ephemeral. But that is part of its charm because you can always say the production was better than it was.

Topics: Theatre, Ephemeral, Charm

Books should make somebody look at how they feel, be honest with themselves.

Topics: Book, Looks, Honest

I've dealt with a lot of producers who were pricks and I'm determined not to be that.

source: - "Clive Barker Speaks Out on Midnight Meat Train". Interview with Brian Gallagher, movieweb.com. February 16, 2009.

Topics: Determined, Producers

I never want to be the producer that I too often got.

source: - "Clive Barker Speaks Out on Midnight Meat Train". Interview with Brian Gallagher, movieweb.com. February 16, 2009.

Topics: Want, Producers