Clive Barker > Quotes

“In my Art
I have but
one fear:
that we will
fail to be
fearless.”
― Clive Barker, Tonight, Again

“Suzanna had argued with zealots before — her brother had been born again at twenty-three, and given his life to Christ — she knew from experience there was no gainsaying the bigotry of faith.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“All the great powers in the world are blood-suckers and soul-stealers at heart.”
― Clive Barker

“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, The Scarlet Gospels

“I will treat you with my knife the way you've treated my pages with your merciless eyes. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards.”
― Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone

“He spoke of both dancing and death with equal nonchalance, as though one carried as little significance as the other. It calmed her, hearing him talk that way.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Winning is beauty. It is like life itself.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“The World-Soul is sick, Harry, crazy-sick. And if we don’t each do our part and try to get to the root of its pain and burn it out, then everything is for nothing.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“Has anyone here ever heard of the Harrowing?” Dale asked, breaking the silence. No one replied. “It was in the time between Christ’s crucifixion and his Resurrection,” he went on. “The story goes, Christ went down into Hell, walked among the damned, and set many of them free. Then he returned to Earth and broke the bondage of death. It’s supposedly the first and only amnesty Hell has ever known.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“For now, they had simpler concerns. Keeping the children from the roofs at night, the bereaved from crying out too loud, the young in summer from falling in love with the human.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Stories had a way of doing that, in Grillo’s experience. It was his belief that nothing, but nothing, could stay secret, however powerful the forces with interests vested in silence. Conspirators might conspire and thugs attempt to gag but the truth, or an approximation of same, would show itself sooner or later, very often in the unlikeliest form. It was seldom hard facts that revealed the life behind the life. It was rumour, graffiti, strip cartoons and love songs.”
― Clive Barker, The Great And Secret Show

“Your kind has a superstitious terror of things ugly and broken; you fear that their condition may somehow infect you.”
― Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone

“So let it do its worst, if that at the last was inevitable. Let the void come, and bring an end to the tyranny of hope.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“And to think, she'd once had the hots for him, back in the old days (six months ago) when razor-thin men with noses like Durante and an encyclopaedic knowledge of de Niro movies had really been her style. Now she saw him for what he was, flotsam from a lost ship of hope. Still a pill-freak, still a theoretical bisexual, still devoted to early Polanski movies and symbolic pacifism.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volume Three

“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, The Hellbound Heart

“She'd taken the harlot century she'd been born into for granted, knowing no other, but now-seeing it with his eyes, hearing it with his ears-she understood it afresh; saw just how desperate it was to please, yet how dispossessed of pleasure; how crude, even as it claimed sophistication; and, despite it's zeal to spellbind, how utterly unenchanting.”
― Clive Barker

“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, Weaveworld

“That's half of your trouble," muttered the crocodile. "You believe everything's true."

"That's because everything is," replied Mr. Bacchus.”
― Clive Barker

“Then, having finished with his gesture of remorse, he sat down, like any decent man who has been deeply wronged, and planned murder.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volumes 1-3

“[Imajica took] fourteen months from the time I first put pen to paper till the day I turned it in. That was writing seven days a week, 14 hours a day. Towards the end it was 16 hours a day. But it was a book which obsessed me, right from the very beginning. I don't quite know yet why that is. Part of it was the fact that the sheer scale of it required total immersion if I was going to pull it off. If I hadn't gotten it right - and I hope I've gotten it at least part right - then I would have looked like a real fool, because here I am dealing with Christ and God and magic and all that stuff. And when, halfway the book, the audience realises that Hapexamendios is the same God that people are worshipping when they go to Sunday Mass, the danger was that the audience would say, "Oh, give me a break. I'll accept the idea of an invented god, but now you're asking me to believe that this god is Jehovah, this god is Yahweh, this god is the God whom people worship in the Western world," and that's a very different thing from one of the gods of a [Stephen] Donaldson novel.

There is a danger of alienating [some readers]. I am sure there are going to be people who will say, "Sorry, this is too long." But I also think there's an audience that says, "Give me everything , tell me everything you can tell me.”
― Clive Barker

“Of course. Remember, I’ve seen you in her. And it’s wonderful.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

“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.”
― Clive Barker

“Anybody can shrug and say life is just some accident of mud and lightning. But Henry, it isn't. And I mean to show you, in the time we have together--whether it's an hour or a day of whatever it is--I mean to show you that you just have to open your heart and look--you hear me, look--and you'll see every minute a hundred reasons to believe."

"Oh, will you?" Henry said, irritated by Diamanda's tone. "And where will I find these hundred reasons?"

"Everywhere!" Diamanda said. "Don't you see we're born into a pattern so huge and so beautiful and so full of meaning we can only hope to understand a tiny part of it in the seventy or eighty years we live with breath in our bodies? But one day, it will all come clear.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

“Living and dying we feed the fire,” Steep said softly. “That is the melancholy truth of things.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“...tonight they all wished they could cut from their mind's configuration the part that knew—had always known, since infancy—that the great wound of the world was deepening, day on day, and they had no choice but feel the hurt as if it was their own, which of course in part it was.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“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, Abarat

“Nothing, I had come to believe by the end, was more illusory than the idea of ending.”
― Clive Barker, The Great And Secret Show

“Who can call a man dead whose words still hush us and whose sentiments move?”
― Clive Barker, Weave World

“Yes, fantastic fiction can be intricately woven into the texture of our daily lives, addressing important issues in fabulist form. But it also serves to release us for a time from the definitions that confine our daily selves; to unplug us from a world that wounds and disappoints us, allowing us to venture into places of magic and transformation.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“We wouldn't eat an important person like you. Sometimes we'll take a sailor, but —" He shrugged. "— so would you if it was always fish.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat