Clive Barker > Quotes

“He looked like a chided child, she thought. Any pretense to machismo had been stripped from him. He was a raw, snotty child. Pathetic and dangerous: the inevitable combination.”
― Clive Barker, The Great And Secret Show

“Each of these parts has a different father and mother, but he assembled me.
The creature was given life eight years earlier in a charnel-house in Prague:
An abattoir and me its fruit, its marvellous boy...I was a clean slate, with no memory of what this brain had been, but I knew my condition. Living corruption, a crowd sewn together in one skin. Anarchy in every limb, and bones that ached to go to dust.”
― Clive Barker

“Come to Daddy,” he said. The phrase didn’t sound right out of Rory’s mouth. Some boys never grew to be daddies, however many children they sired.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Now that’s the way a poet should dress,” Lemuel declared when he came back for Cal. “Like a blind thief.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Everywhere, in the wreckage around him, he found evidence to support the same bitter thesis: that he hd encountered nothing in his life—no person, no state of mind or body—he wanted sufficiently to suffer even passing discomfort for.”
― Clive Barker

“Legends are not born or made, they just are.”
― Clive Barker

“The dead have highways. They run, unerring lines of ghost trains, of dream-carriages, across the wasteland behind our lives, bearing an endless traffic of departed souls. Their thrum and throb can be heard in the broken places of the world, through cracks made by acts of cruelty, violence and depravity. Their freight, the wandering dead, can be glimpsed when the heart is close to bursting, and sights that should be hidden come plainly into view. They have signposts, these highways, and bridges and lay-bys. They have turnpikes and intersections. It is at these intersections, where the crowds of dead mingle and cross, that this forbidden highway is most likely to spill through into our world.”
― Clive Barker

“That which can be imagined need never be lost.”
― Clive Barker

“Speculative horror has become our generation’s most viable tradition of the passed story.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“Shrine of the Mortalities.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Try to finish everything. You’ll always find your enthusiasm for a project waning as it goes on, and you’ll be tempted by a new idea, but learn to ignore the latter and continue with the former. If you start abandoning work, you set a bad precedent, and establish a pattern for the years to come. And be nice to booksellers: never let them pay for a round.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“He became aware (was it just his dream life, denied its span in sleepless nights, spreading into wakefulness?) of another world, hovering beyond or behind the facade of reality.”
― Clive Barker

“And when you’re very lucky, a third state comes your way: what I’ll call the ecstatic. It doesn’t happen very often, at least to me, and when it does it never lasts very long, but when it’s gone you know it. What is this state? Damned if I know. I do know that it invariably comes when you least expect it. Suddenly you’re expressing feelings you didn’t know you had, you’re seeing patterns you didn’t know were there to be found, and better still, you find you have the words to express those feelings, those patterns. When it’s over, you come down from the experience feeling tender and vulnerable. But what has happened on the page is somehow new to you, as though another mind has created it. More than once I’ve been tempted to reject or even destroy work I made in this state, motivated by an unhealthy desire to recall the text within the boundaries of what’s recognizably mine.”
― Clive Barker, The Essential Clive Barker: Selected Fiction

“Every love story was - at the last - a story of death; this was what the poets insisted. Why should it be any less true the other way about?”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volumes Four to Six

“The pleasure of the supernatural short story lies in not having to explain anything. They’re just glimpses, a momentary lifting of the veil.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“One part of love is innocence, One part of love is guilt, One part the milk, that in a sense Is soured as soon as spilt, One part of love is sentiment, One part of love is lust, One part is the presentiment Of our return to dust.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Forgive my Art. On bended knees, I do confess: I seek to please.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“[La narrativa horror] ci mostra che il controllo che crediamo di avere è puramente illusorio e che ogni momento vacilliamo nel caos e nell'oblio.”
― Clive Barker

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

“Most of this is beyond even our comprehension, but we offer you what we know. It’s a spirit. And it once stood guard over a place where magic was. A garden, some have said, though that may be simply another fiction.” “Why should it want to wipe the Seerkind out?” “They were made there, in that garden, kept from the eyes of Humankind, because they had raptures. But they fled from it.” “And Uriel —” “— was left alone, guarding an empty place. For centuries.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“It wasn’t love she felt for him. That was too big a burden of feeling to carry. It was at best infatuation, mingled with that sense of impending loss she always tasted when close to somebody, as though every moment in his presence she was internally mourning the time when he would no longer be there.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“unshooable”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“sick as a flea in a leper’s jock strap.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“way, is music. I hear that longing in countless pieces: in Barber’s Adagio, in the “In Paradisum” from the Fauré Requiem, in the “Liebestod” from Tristan and Isolde; in Max Steiner’s film scores, in folk songs like “Blow the Wind Southerly” and “Shenandoah”
― Clive Barker, The Essential Clive Barker: Selected Fiction

“May there be a cleansing in your absolution.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“If I've learned anything from two decades of fantastique writing it's that the more extraordinary the subject matter the more specific the details need to be.”
― Clive Barker, Incarnations: Three Plays by Clive Barker

“I wonder if the reverse is not also in some way true. That the artist is constantly working on an elaborate and fantasticated self-portrait, but at the end has drawn, unbeknown, a picture of the world.”
― Clive Barker, The Essential Clive Barker: Selected Fiction

“Radinka appears as a regular human female, normal in every facet except one: her eyes. She possesses a pair of grotesquely enlarged, almost froglike optical organs, their protruding lenses marring what would be an otherwise-perfect woman's face. These eyes are unique not only in their appearance, however; Radinka can perceive her surroundings only as they were in the past. She has therefore spent the bulk of her life attempting to marry her vision of the past with the messages she receives from her other senses of the present. The Conjuction, as she calls her condition, proves to Radinka beyond a reasonable doubt that reality is, in fact, more than the sum of its parts.”
― Clive Barker, The Nightbreed Chronicles

“For a time he had tried to forget her; it was more convenient that way. Now he clung to thoughts of that face, bereft. He wondered if he would see her again.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“Even today I keep a Dream Journal. It's whatever's going on in my subconscious, or things from dreams or even interesting items that pop into my head. I have thousands of pages of notes which I hope someday will turn into stories, or movies...Being on the road gives me breathing time and the opportunity to think about what to do next. In fact right before I came down for lunch today, I was writing down notes about my feelings. Things that I need to do to keep motivated. I need to be motivated if I am to going to devote fifteen months to writing another book. And I couldn't write a book just because it's a commercial idea. I need to have a compelling reason.”
― Clive Barker