Clive Barker > Quotes

“but as his years advanced Lewis had seen less and less purpose in distinguishing between fact and fiction.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“watching the ice-floes dance together on the black water.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“He stood dressed in voluminous robes of thrice-burned silk (the blackest, most portentous; the silk of all melancholias) and studied the lightless waters of the Izabella as the barge sped on.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

“Brooding only looks good in the movies.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“Decker pulled the mask on. It smelt of his excitement. As soon as he breathed in he got a hard. Not the little sex-hard, but the death-hard; the murder-hard. It sniffed the air for him, even through the thickness of his trousers and underwear. It smelt the victim that ran ahead of him. The Mask didn't care that his prey was female; he got the murder-hard for anyone. In his time he'd had a heat for old men, pissing their pants as they went down in front of him; for girls, sometimes; sometimes women; even children. Ol' Button Face looked with the same cross-threaded eyes on the whole of humanity.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“La oscuridad también ha de desempeñar un papel. Sin ella, ¿cómo sabríamos que caminamos por la senda de la luz? Solamente cuando sus pretensiones se crecen debemos enfrentarnos a ella, domarla y a veces –llegado el caso- someterla durante un tiempo. Después se erguirá de nuevo, como debe ser.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

“The Hell Priest had begun to utter what sounded like a cross between a chant and an equation: numbers and words intertwined.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“If you want to be a big success then it becomes a dick showing contest, and that's not what it's about. It can't be about 'My book sold more copies than your book.' It can't be about 'More people went to see my movie than went to see your movie.' If it is about that, then Danielle Steel must be an extraordinarily wonderful author because she sells so many copies. You can't do calculations that way.
What interests me is holding the vision: doing something that is yours and making sure that it can't be like anyone else's.”
― Clive Barker

“I begin. I write a draft without ever looking back. Without ever touching what's gone before. Because I think it will be shit, so I daren't look back. I write a draft. I start again. I have the text when I start the second draft and then I do the same thing a third time.
- To Linda L. Richards, The January Interview”
― Clive Barker

“With Floyd we had three hundred and ninety-eight years between us. All that bitter experience," he said, "and not one of us wise.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 5

“As Harry marveled, the Cenobite continued his brutal effort of making new adjustments to his own flesh so as to fit the Devil’s suit: first a slice off his other hip, down to the red meat; then up to his arms, slicing away the flesh at the back of his triceps; and passing the knife from left hand to right and back again, cutting effortlessly with either. The area around his feet looked like the floor of a butcher’s store. Cobs and slices of fatty meat were scattered everywhere.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“So saying,”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

“In a town where words were cheap, talk could be expensive.”
― Clive Barker, The Great And Secret Show

“That’s a whole other story.’ ‘Is it?’ Gentle replied. ‘Or is it all one?”
― Clive Barker, Imajica: A spellbinding epic fantasy novel

“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 its zeal to spellbind, how utterly unenchanting.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“In my mind the river flows both ways. Forward, to the explanation of things; to a destination which will justify the agonies of travel. And back, back to a time when the river was real, and those who wandered along its banks had little interest in visions.”
― Clive Barker, Chiliad: A Meditation

“When it was all done, Suzanna found her voice, thanking both the grave diggers and their mothers. “After all that digging,” said the eldest of the girls, “I just hope he grows.” “He will,” said her mother, with no trace of indulgence. “They always do.” On”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“ananged”
― Clive Barker, Everville

“hurt people hurt people,”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“Sounds to me like those nails are touching too much gray matter.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“The Pantheons made themselves apparent in the blink of an eye; perhaps less. At one instant the planet was a place of faith, doubt, and godlessness, the next there was room for none of these. Who needed faith when the senses confirmed all? As for doubt and godlessness, they were absurdities now that every deity that had ever appeared in human consciousness (and some several hundred thousand who had never made it) had manifested themselves. The Coming was indiscriminate; it made no distinction between great divinities and small. There were vast and transformative powers abroad, deities that brought with them fleets of angelic vehicles and all manner of divine paraphernalia, but there were also threadbare local gods, guardians of painted rocks, spirits of bamboo groves; presences that healed sores and brought lovers, demons who haunted empty roads and forsaken hotels. A world of yearning and need was suddenly a place of surfeit; and the end of mankind began, for there was nothing left invisible, or unknowable, and therefore nothing left to hope for or desire.”
― Clive Barker, Chiliad: A Meditation

“I don’t plot or outline, though I may take a few notes here and there, instead I let my dream world fill up each night with a segment of the story. I do this without worrying about it, or trying to force it, and when I wake up the dream bag is full, and I can go to my writing desk, and dream all over the page.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“Didn't open the box? What was it last time? Didn't know what it was? And yet we do keep finding each other, don't we? - Cenobite”
― Clive Barker

“We cannot believe, we men, that power will ever reside happily in the body of a woman, unless that power is a male child. Not true power. The power must be in male hands, God-given. That's what our fathers tell us, idiots that they are”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volume Two

“There’s nothing heroic about sacrificing yourself for him,” Zeffer pointed out. “He wouldn’t do it for you.” “I know that.”
― Clive Barker, Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

“We’re making strange fictions of strange things inside ourselves.”
― Clive Barker

“Discretion’s the better part of valor,”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“Do demons have ghosts?' Norma asked him.
'Of course,' Knotchee replied. 'There will always be those who won't let go of who they were.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“but she felt as though whatever she’d been given in the Devil’s Country it was affecting her mind, not her body, and it was not doing anything remotely healing. Quite the reverse.”
― Clive Barker, Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

“Hayal edilen asla yitirilmez.”
― Clive Barker, Weave World