Clive Barker > Quotes

“He[Tom] read from the Almenak."'The song that the Vigil Snake sings is in fact one immensely long word; the longest in the ancient language of the species. It is so long that an individual can sing it for a lifetime and never come to the end of it.'"
"That sounds like a Kleppism to me," Geneva said. "How would they ever learn it?"
"Good question," said Tom. "Maybe they're born with it, like a migration instinct?"'
"Born with a song,"said Geneva.
Tom smiled. "Yes. Don't you like that idea?"
"Liking it and having it be true aren't the same thing, Tom."
"Huh. Sometimes you need to let things strike your heart and not your head, Geneva.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

“I will say it one last time: Demonation! The feeling of it! There are no words -how can there be?- to describe what it feels like to become words, to feel your life encoded, and laid out in black ink on white paper. All my love and hatred, melted into words. It was like the End of the World.”
― Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone

“He’d fill every moment with the seasons he’d found in his heart: hopes like birds on a spring branch; happiness like a warm summer sun; magic like the rising mists of autumn. And best of all, love; love enough for a thousand Christmases.”
― Clive Barker, The Thief of Always

“Midian is where the monsters go.”
― Clive Barker

“Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs”
― Clive Barker, Weave World

“I think babies cry when they’re born because they’re born with the knowledge of all the terrible shit that’s gonna happen to them. That’s why I never had kids. Every life is a death sentence. We just forget it later in life, like dreams we lose the second we wake up. Whether we worry about it or not, the shit’s still going to fly. The important thing is we’re here. At least for now.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“Leavening the flat bread of what we know, with the yeast of what we dream may come to pass.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

“We cry for ourselves, don't we? Not for the dead. The dead are past caring.”
― Clive Barker

“If one has given oneself utterly, watching the beloved sleep can be a vile experience. Perhaps some of you have known that paralysis, staring down at features closed to your enquiry, locked away from you where you can never, ever go, into the other’s mind. As I say, for us who have given ourselves, that is a horror. One knows, in those moments, that one does not exist, except in relation to that face, that personality. Therefore, when that face is closed down, that personality is lost in its own unknowable world, one feels completely without purpose. A planet without a sun, revolving in darkness.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volume Two

“Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa. And he knew it well enough to call it home.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Beautiful," Grillo said.
"Would Swift approve?"
"Fuck Swift."
"Somebody should have.”
― Clive Barker, The Great and Secret Show

“What worth was a man who could not be haunted?”
― Clive Barker, In the Flesh

“The extraordinary's the norm.”
― Clive Barker, The Great and Secret Show

“The moon had risen behind him, the color of a shark's underbelly. It lit the ruined walls, and the skin of his arms and hands, with its sickly light, making him long for a mirror in which to study his face. Surely he'd be able to see the bones beneath the meat; the skull gleaming the way his teeth gleamed when he smiled. After all, wasn't that what a smile said? Hello, world, this is the way I'll look when the wet parts are rotted.”
― Clive Barker, The Great and Secret Show

“It was as though in these last minutes together--when they had so much to say--they could say nothing of the least significance, for fear it open the floodgates.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“As long as they could still be moved by a minor chord, or brought to a crisis of tears by scenes of lovers reunited; as long as there was room in their cautious hearts for games of chance, and laughter in the face of God, that must surely be enough to save them, at the last. If not, there was no hope for any living thing.”
― Clive Barker, Weave World

“So now, I look at these stories, and almost like a photograph snapped at a party, I find all manner of signs and indications of who I was. Was? Yes, was. I look at these pieces and I don't think the man who wrote them is alive in me anymore. Writing an introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of Weaveworld last year I remarked on much of the same thing: the man who'd written that book was no longer around. He'd died in me, was buried in me. We are our own graveyards; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we're neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three

“People are like books. Everywhere they're opened, they're read.”
― Clive Barker

“They will all abandon you. All you have left is my desire for you.”
― Clive Barker

“The un-people, the anti-tribe, humanity’s sack unpicked and sewn together again with the moon inside.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Let us not neglect the forbidden. Let us not sophisticate ourselves out of the cheap thrill and chill of it: the story told for perversity's sake, and all the better for that; the image created because an artist gets tired of reasons sometimes, and wants to dredge up some picture he's been haunted by, and parade it like a new tattoo. I go with it, readily.”
― Clive Barker

“Dawn was close. The weaker stars had already disappeared, and even the brightest were uncertain of themselves.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Christopher Carrion is me. Christopher Carrion is a man who has had love in his life and that love has not always been good with him. Christopher Carrion is a man who has nightmares but eats them. Christopher Carrion is a man who is very lonely a lot of the time. Christopher Carrion is a man who people look at very strangely sometimes and they are very quiet around him... Christopher Carrion is intimidating, Christopher Carrion is frightening, but, as you very well know, behind closed doors, Christopher Carrion is sad and alone and Christopher Carrion wants very much to be redeemed, he just doesn't know how to be redeemed.”
― Clive Barker, Beneath The Surface of Clive Barker's Abarat

“Who can call a man dead whose words still hush and whose sentiments move?”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld - Books 1-3

“Well, it was most likely too late; there would not be time for me to flagellate myself for every dishonorable deed in that list, nor any chance to make good the harms I’d done. Minor harms, to be sure, in the scheme of things; but large enough to regret.”
― Clive Barker, Galilee

“Her skin was flawless and always cool, always pale; her body was long, like her hair, like her fingers, like her laughter; and her eyes, oh, her eyes, had every season of leaf in them: the twin greens of spring and high summer, the golds of autumn, and, in her rages, black midwinter rot.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica: Featuring New Illustrations and an Appendix

“I don't want to see another church; the smell of the places makes me sick. Stale incense, old sweat, and lies...

"In the Hills, the Cities”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume One

“At best you can hold death at bay, you can pretend it isn't there; but to deny it totally is a sickness. And I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems, and, perversely perhaps, to enjoy a vicarious confrontation with them.”
― Clive Barker

“All had this in common: that if they returned from the Empty Quarter - even though their journey might have taken them only a day's ride into that place - they came back changed men. Nobody could set his eyes on such a void and return to hearth and home without having lost a part of himself to the wilderness forever. Many, having endured the void once, went back, and back again, as if daring the desert to claim them; not content until it did. And those unhappy few who died at home, died with their eyes not on the loving faces at their bedside, nor on the cherry tree in blossom outside the window, but on that waste that called them as only the Abyss can call, promising the soul the balm of nothingness.”
― Clive Barker, Weave World

“Make a fist. Lightly. Leave enough room for a breath to pass through. Good. Good. All magic proceeds from breath. Remember that.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica