Clive Barker > Quotes

“Among his memories of the whole and the human, sharpest was that of Decker.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Three is the number of those who do holy work;
Two is the number of those who do lovers work;
One is the number of those who do perfect evil
Or perfect good.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

“Or were they breed who had died from their half-life, caught in the sun, perhaps, or withered by longing?”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Dreams are doorways...If we but have the courage to step over the threshold.”
― Clive Barker, Everville

“Flesh is a trap, and magic sets us free.”
― Clive Barker

“The Deluge wasn’t a wave, was it? It was blind men with axes; it was the great on their knees begging not to die at the hands of idiots; it was the itch of the irrational grown to an epidemic.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“This was the nadir, surely. They had no further to fall.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“Con el tiempo, todas las cosas se cansan y comienzan a buscar algún oponente que las salve de sí mismas.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“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, Chiliad: A Meditation

“Logic is the last refuge of a coward.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume One

“This book is so huge, that the mythology took many months to create. There are literally hundreds of characters , and many different worlds described in great detail. It's not the sort of thing that you can simply dash off. I hand-write everything. Now, I've done three drafts on Imajica, which comes to about 14,000 pages. When you're working on a novel, you really must give your life over to the project. This is my eleventh book, and I'm fortunate to know that the audience is there for it. I'm not just writing in the dark.”
― Clive Barker

“Men’s supply of passion, she knew from long experience, was easily depleted. Though they might threaten to move earth and heaven too, half an hour later their boasts would be damp sheets and resentment.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 4

“Houses weren’t haunted, only human minds.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“Her mother had always said that women, being more at peace with themselves than men, needed fewer distractions from their hurts.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“Here are the stories written on the Book of Blood. They are a map of that dark highway that leads out of life towards unknown destinations. Few will have to take it, most will go on peacefully along lamplit streets, ushered out of living with prayers and caresses. But for a few, a chosen few, the horrors will come, skipping to fetch them off to the highway of the damned...”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volumes Four to Six

“He wouldn’t be remembered well.”
― Clive Barker, The Great And Secret Show

“All Darkness was one darkness in the end. Of heart or Heavens, one Darkness.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“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.”
― Clive Barker, Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

“For some reason, the doodles that she had drawn in her workbook came back into her mind. Only this time, instead of being black lines on gray, recycled paper, they were bright in her mind; very bright. And all kinds of colors, the way the sun appeared in your mind if you looked at it for a moment and then closed your eyes. Dozens of little suns: green and red and gold; then colors, too, that you couldn't even name. That was the way the lines looked in Candy's mind's eye.

And they were moving. The wavy lines were rolling across the darkness inside her skull, rolling and breaking, the brilliant colors bursting into arabesques of white and silver.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

“He was to be used to record their testaments. He was to be their page, their book, the vessel for their autobiographies. A book of blood. A book made of blood. A book written in blood. She thought of the grimoires that had been made of dead human skin: she'd seen them, touched them. She thought of the tattoos she'd seen: freak show exhibits some of them, others just shirtless laborers in the street with a message to their mothers pricked across their backs. It was not unknown, to write a book of blood.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“If life was simpler we wouldn't get lost in it”
― Clive Barker

“Are you ready for the apocalypse?”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“They will say your doubts shed innocent blood. But I say - what's blood for, if not for shedding?”
― Clive Barker, The Forbidden

“Lost in the wasteland, Ashbery was found by a light flickering up from between the fractured paving stones. Its beams were bitterly cold, and sticky in a way light had no right to be, adhering to his sleeve and hand before fading away. Intrigued, he tracked its source from one eruption to another, each point brighter than the one before.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“So intent was Frank upon solving the puzzle of Lemarchand’s box that he didn’t hear the great bell begin to ring.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“He liked the phrase “mother’s tit.” It said so much, so simply. Momma’s tit had a good deal more power to move these men than her apple pie.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“Fear gripped Harry, like some old dope-pusher promising a terrible high.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 6

“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

“Muck held the whip hand.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“She’s got powers,” said de Bono, taking off his spectacles and surveying the terrain ahead. “Most women have, of course.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld