Clive Barker > Quotes

“Every man is his own Mephistopheles, don’t you think? If I hadn’t come along you’d have made a bargain with some other power. And you would have had your fortune, and your women, and your strawberries. All those torments I’ve made you suffer.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“But if it failed to show itself she would not grieve too deeply, for fear that the mending of broken hearts be a puzzle neither wit nor time had the skill to solve.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Women had always existed: they had lived, a species to themselves, with the demons. But they had wanted playmates: and together they had made men. What an error, what a cataclysmic miscalculation.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“But everything slipped through his fingers sooner or later, and with time he began to wonder whether it was circumstance that denied him a good hold on his earnings, or whether he simply didn’t care enough to keep what he had. The train of thought, once begun, was a runaway. 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.

A downward spiral began. He spent three months in a wash of depression and self pity that bordered on the suicidal. But even that solution was denied him by his newfound nihilism. If nothing was worth living for it followed, didn’t it, that there was nothing worth dying for either.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“I'm interested in the places where sex reminds of me of death, where sex and love and passions bring one close to thinking about death. It may be my own problem, but sex reminds me of death very regulary. Anything which transforms one's life, as the sex act does, for half an hour or half a day, makes one look at oneself afresh. Think back to our adolescence and the way that sex looked to us then. It was quite an extraordinary thing-and it wasn't just ignorance that made it seem so. Familiarity makes us lose focus on how subversive sex is. It comes into our lives and breaks down our normal perception of
ourselves.”
― Clive Barker

“You know, as a child I thought somebody came and took the world away in the night and then came back and unrolled it all again the following morning.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“Gli parve che l'unica soluzione potesse essere la follia, nessuna speranza se non la perdita della speranza.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Memory, prophecy and fantasy—the past, the future and the dreaming moment between—are all one country, living one immortal day. To know that is Wisdom. To use it is the Art.”
― Clive Barker, The Great And Secret Show

“And in that he shared a common history with most of the men who wandered Folsom and Polk and Market this late afternoon. Men whose mothers and fathers - however loving, however liberal - would never understand them the way they understood their straight children, because these gay sons were genetic cul-de-sacs. Men who would be obliged to make their own families: out of friends, out of lovers, out of divas. Men who were self-invented, for better or worse, makers of styles and mythologies which they constantly cast off with the impatience of souls who would never find a description that quite fitted. If there was a sadness in this there was also a kind of unholy glee.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“But he’d brought new wisdom from the high places. He knew now that things forgotten might be recalled; things lost, found again.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Lori had broken that spell of despair, coming to him not begging but demanding he forgive himself.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“We’re all in it together, Harry. We’re all pieces of the fisherman. I know that sounds like a bullshit answer, but you’ll see, when you start to work with the dead. Everyone’s complicit: the most innocent little kiddies; babies who live a day, an hour—they still have a hand in things, even their own deaths. I know that’s very hard for you to get your head around right now, but take it from someone that’s spent a lot of time with death.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive. Here he was, buried in the belly of that smothering month, wondering if he would ever find his way out through the cold coils that lay between here and Easter.”
― Clive Barker, The Thief of Always

“Can you hear me, Todd? There’s an ambulance on its way.” For a moment his eyes opened a little wider, and he seemed to be making an effort to concentrate on the face in front of him. “It’s Maxine,” she said. “Remember me?”
― Clive Barker, Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

“He started down the slope towards it, dressed in the blood of his enemy.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“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, Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

“Look at him." The Autarch glanced back at the captive as he spoke. He's got seconds left to live. But the leech gave him a taste and he wants it back again."

"A taste of what?"

"Of the womb, Rosengarten. He said it was like being in the womb. We're all cast out. Whatever we build, wherever we hide, we're cast out.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica

“I decided that I would do my best to be the worst thing Hell ever vomited forth.”
― Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone

“Now, I don't believe that a god exists. I think that gods are creation of men, by men, and for men. What has happened over the many centuries now, the better part of two thousand in fact, is that God has been slowly and steadily accruing power. His church has been accruing power, and the men who run that church, and they are all men, are not about to give it up. If they give it up, they give up luxury, they give up comfort.”
― Clive Barker

“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, Cabal

“The way she saw it, she was lucky. She wasn't really blind—she just saw a different world from most other folks, and that put her in a unique position to do some good in the world.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“To every hour, its mystery. At dawn, the riddles of life and light. At noon, the conundrums of solidity. At three, in the hum and heat of the day, a phantom moon, already high. At dusk, memory. And at midnight? Oh, then the enigma of time itself; of a day that will never come again passing into history while we sleep. It”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“Le stagioni si agognano l’un l’altra, come uomini e donne, in modo da essere guarite dai loro eccessi. La primavera, se si protrae per più di una settimana oltre il suo tempo naturale, comincia a patire l’assenza dell’estate che ponga fine ai giorni della promessa perpetua. L’estate dal suo canto comincia ben presto a invocare qualcosa che plachi la sua calura e il più ubere degli autunni alla lunga si stanca della sua generosità e reclama una rapida, aspra gelata che lo sterilizzi. Persino l’inverno, la più dura delle stagioni, la più implacabile, sogna all’apparire di febbraio la fiamma che presto lo scioglierà. Ogni cosa si stanca con il tempo e comincia a cercare un suo contrario che la salvi da se stessa. Così agosto cedette il posto a settembre e pochi se ne lamentarono.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“I do three drafts handwritten and then it's typed up... They are different from each other, they are hopefully improvements in the sense you're going back over something. The first time you write it, it's the first thing that you can think. The second time you're trying to shape the dialogue, helping the characters. The third time you're doing it because you want the words to sound nice, hopefully making the prose better, making it more fun to read, making the jokes funnier and the scary bits scarier.”
― Clive Barker

“No sword shall touch you. Unless it be mine.” — Anonymous, lover’s oath”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“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.”
― Clive Barker

“The seasons long for each other, like men and women, in order that they may be cured of their excesses.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“When, finally, she did sleep, it was the slumber of a watcher and waiter. Light, and full of sighs.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“You opened their eyes to another world, darling. They'll never forgive you for that.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Absolute Midnight