Clive Barker Quotes

“What can be imagined—
—need never be lost.”

“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.”

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

“Movies are much more fascist than books. They tell you what to feel, when to feel it. Popular movies manipulate you. Music tells you when it's a sad part and when it's a happy part. You're obliged to watch them at the speed the filmmaker has created for you. That, I think, is one of the reasons why they're so popular - because you don't have to think very hard. The filmmaker has done all the thinking for you.”

“Give me B movies or give me death!”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“One of the reasons why I don't get on with most fantasy writing - enchanted sword fantasy writing - is because I think it's emotionally untrue. People behave in very simple ways, unparadoxical ways. What I'm trying to do is bring into fantasy - as I hope I've been able to bring to horror - a certain kind of emotional realism. People have mentioned sex as being a major part of my fiction. An awful lot of horror fiction simply never contained that kind of material. Which seems to me to be extraordinary because most horror fiction is about the body in some way or other, and therefore it should be about sensuality and eroticism every bit as much as it's about corruption.”

“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.”

“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."”

“Perhaps there was a natural process at work here; a means by which the mind dealt with experiences that contradicted a lifetime’s prejudices about the nature of reality. People simple forgot.”

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

“Every body is a book of blood;
Wherever we're opened, we're red.”

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

“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.”

“Here is a list of fearful things:
The jaws of sharks, a vulture's wings,
The rabid bite of the dog's of war,
The voice of one who went before.
But most of all the mirror's gaze,
which counts us out our numbered days.”

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

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

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

“Life is short,
and pleasures few,
and holed the ship,
and drowned the crew,
But O! But O!
How very blue
the sea is!”

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

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

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

“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 sadist of her.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“Welcome to the worst nightmare of all, reality!”

“Words are sexier than flesh.”

“Is there any good news?' Tesla said.
Who ever promised that? Who ever said there'd benews?”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“The great grey beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.”

“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”

“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!”

“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!”

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

“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.”

“Have patience; the lovers will suffer lovers always suffer.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“Always, worlds within worlds.”

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

“As to the remnants of his army—those Seerkind who’d embraced the Prophet’s visions—they’d been the authors of their own punishment, waking from their evangelical nightmare to find it had destroyed all they held dear.”

“Nothing ever begins.
There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.
The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to 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.
Thus the pagan will be sanctified, the tragic become laughable; great lovers will stoop to sentiment, and demons dwindle to clockwork toys.
Nothing is fixed. In and out the shuttle goes, fact and fiction, mind and matter woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that hidden amongst them is a filigree which will with time become a world.
It must be arbitrary then, the place at which we chose to embark.
Somewhere between a past half forgotten and a future as yet only glimpsed.”

“He would be vigilant, but he would anticipate nothing, neither disaster nor revelation.
That was not to say he would give up looking to the future. True, he was just a Cuckoo: scared and weary and alone. But so, in the end were most of his tribe: it didn’t mean all was lost. As long as they could still be moved by a minor chord, or brought to a crisis of tears by scenes of lovers reunited; as long as there was room in their cautious hearts for games of chance, and laughter in the face of God, that must surely be enough to save them, at the last.
If not, there was no hope for any living thing.”

“By and large, horror fiction is the most difficult to domesticate because part of the point is that it's one step ahead – or behind – everybody else's taste. And I'm not really convinced I'd like it to change. There's something very healthy about horror fiction being always a little bit on the outside. It's the wild-dog genre.”

“…Take this all of you and eat it. This is my body which will be given up for you…
Old words; old rituals. But they still made sound commercial sense.
Talk of Power and Might would always attract an audience. Lords never went out of fashion.”