Clive Barker > Quotes

“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

“Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born. —Matthew Arnold, The Grande Chartreuse”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“It was the end of the world, and the beginning of worlds.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“All this talk of necromancy was just a morbid veil drawn over the filthy truth of the matter. Poor Elise! Stuck with a broken-down husband, who knew no better way to please than to give her over to an Englishman for an occasional pleasuring. Of all things, an Englishman! As if the English knew anything about making love.

("Haeckel's Tale")”
― Clive Barker, Best New Horror 17

“Books are like people, when they are open they are red”
― Clive Barker

“I dreamed I spoke in another’s language, I dreamed I lived in another’s skin, I dreamed I was my own beloved, I dreamed I was a tiger’s kin. I dreamed that Eden lived inside me, And when I breathed a garden came, I dreamed I knew all of Creation, I dreamed I knew the Creator’s name. I dreamed—and this dream was the finest— That all I dreamed was real and true, And we would live in joy forever, You in me, and me in you.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

“In this maelstrom his feelings for her had the purity of mathematics. Its equations—complex, but elegant in their proofs—offered a nicety that was like truth. He had to hold on to this recognition. If he once relinquished it he was lost.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“It would not have made a good book, I think. It would have been a folly. Its best telling was in these paragraphs: they contain all the ironies a tome would have contained, and waste less ink.”
― Clive Barker, Chiliad: A Meditation

“You hear stories all the time, about how some lucky man escaped death because he sneezed, or died for the same reason. Tales of benign providence, or fatal bad fortune. And after a while you begin to look at the world a little differently: you begin to see chance at work everywhere. You become alive to its mysteries. And of course to its flip side; to determinism. Because take it from me there are men who make their own luck. Men who can mold chance like putty. You talked yourself of feeling a tingle in your hands. As though today, whatever you did, you couldn't lose.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“Pleasure is a reward, given to the human system by evolution in return for services rendered to the preservation and increase of the species.”
― Clive Barker, Chiliad: A Meditation

“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.” ― Clive Barker, Abarat”
― Clive Barker

“انسان ها افراد ناسپاسی هستند که خداوند متعال را با اختیاری که به آنها داده است به محل سوء استفاده ی خود قرار داده اند ، جنگ و خونریزی و ناعدالتی نمایش غرور و خودکامگی انسان ها در جهان است با ستایش و عبادت خدا است که بین قلوب انسان ها محبت و دوستی به وسیله ی آفریدگار مهربان شکل می گیرد و جنگ و خونریزی جای آن را به صلح و مهربانی شکل می گیرد.”
― Clive Barker

“everywhere along the street the same domestic rituals that he’d witnessed here since his childhood were being played out. Radios announced the morning’s news through open windows and doors: a Parliamentarian had been found dead in his mistress’ arms; bombs had been dropped in the Middle East. Slaughter and scandal, scandal and slaughter. And was the tea too weak this morning, my dear? and did the children wash behind their ears?”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“The proximity of this harem aroused him, despite circumstances. He opned his trousers and caressed his cock, more eager to have the seed spilled and so be freed of these creatures than for the pleasure of it.”
― Clive Barker

“Every day is a writing day. I get to my desk between 8 and 8:30 in the morning and then work through until 6pm, and then normally I'll take up whatever will be happening in the evening, usually painting or photography.

I do about four drafts total. I do handwritten drafts because I don't type and I have no wish to type. I mean, I know how to type, but I have no interest in putting the words down that way.
Maybe that's because I'm an artist and because I've always used a pen and so there's a sort of natural feel to it.

I don't know how familiar you are with Blake's illuminated texts, but you know very often he'll literally make words flower. It's really this glorious thing in bringing words and pictures into the same place, the same space.”
― Clive Barker

“marriages between humankind and the great bestiary”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

“This is the state of the beast," it said, "to eat and be eaten.”
― Clive Barker

“Horror shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory.”
― Clive Barker

“Perhaps to be flawless was another kind of sadness.”
― Clive Barker

“The first of the quintet to be called was a young woman in a long, dark dress, her small face pale, her closed eyes fringed with ginger lashes. This, the bees said, is Lilia Pellicia.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“In the high times of his evil, Hood had been the House. Now, it was the other way around. The House, what was left of it, had become Mr. Hood.”
― Clive Barker, The Thief of Always

“So you can't please all the people all the time. All you can do is what pleases you, and hope that it pleases other people.
I love my readers, and I respect my readers, but I'm not going to simplify or echo myself, copy myself, just so the sales will be better.”
― Clive Barker

“I'm constantly trying to make what Stephen King called head movies or skull movies: things should be playing out on the inside of your eyes, if you will, without you having to think about me as an author being present.
I have no interest in being present, in intervening between you and the work. My job is to be as invisible as possible. My job is to say, 'Hey, I wrote this book and I'm on the cover, bye bye!'
The story should have its own momentum; it should make its own way. I have no patience for that showy kind of writing, which is all about how clever the writer is. Postmodern stuff just leaves me totally cold.
I'm much more interested in being drawn into a book, and I want to create the kind of writing which hopefully makes you turn and turn the pages.”
― Clive Barker

“telling them with faith in the tale, not because every fantasy was absolutely true but because no reality ever was.”
― Clive Barker, The Great And Secret Show

“In the final arithmetic his life was a wasteland: of fire, of snow, of sand. All of it, a wasteland, and he would wander there ’til he could wander no more.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“They were one indivisible thought, imagining each other.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“Things came and went away; that was a kind of magic. And in between? Pursuits and conjurings, horrors, guises. The occasional joy.
That there was room for joy, ah! that was magic too.”
― Clive Barker, The Last Illusion

“Once the work is up and under way, once the world is breathing, you have to surrender to it: to its rhythms, to its intentions, to its ugliness, sometimes; to its beauty, others. Sometimes this surrender, which is the second state of creation, feels perilous. You float in a murky place for long periods, waiting for the sense of things to show itself. Doubt devours you. This time, you think, there’s nothing there to bear you up. You’re just going to sink, while these illusions you created watch you go down. And then, miraculously, something begins to happen. The story begins to move before you, like a pageant. Still surrendering, you describe it. If you’re lucky, there are days when this other world is so familiar to you that you can operate in that journalistic fashion I described before and simply report what you see. Some days too when you have to wait, not pushing too hard, not demanding that the sense of all this show itself before it wants to; listening, deeply; watching, deeply.”
― Clive Barker, The Essential Clive Barker: Selected Fiction

“Whether you are a good or bad writer is an irrelevancy when you first begin. What's important is that you write, you get up in the morning and you say, "I'm going to treat this like a job and I'm not going to just do this when I feel like it. I'm going to really get to work on making this the best I can make it, and work hard to achieve something". You can't sit around waiting for inspiration to strike like lightning, cause you'll wait around for a long time. Maybe once every blue moon a piece of lightning will strike, but most of the time you'll wait around twiddling your thumbs. What you have to do is just get on with it, and write whatever comes out and not worry over much about whether the punctuation is right or the spelling is right or even if the order of the words is right, but just get on with it.
"You have to go after, seek after the things which are truthful to you. And I mean truthful. If you don't believe in Christ, then don't have a hero whipping out holy water when it suits him, because you're not telling the truth about what you believe about the world. If you don't believe that the image of Christ is ethicasy in the world, then don't have your hero use it in such a way. All you doing is accessing a series of cliches from somebody else's work. If you're gay, write about gay characters. If you're straight, write about straight characters. If you're straight and confused, write about straight and confused characters. If your passion is about painting and football, write about painting and football. Write about your mother, write about your father, write about things you know, and then let your imagination lurk on those things and develop them into something new and fresh even for you. Surprise yourself, astonish yourself, and tell the truth. ”
― Clive Barker

“Bitches, most of us. Me included. But sometimes you need to be a bitch so you can get through the day.”
― Clive Barker, Coldheart Canyon