Clive Barker > Quotes

“Part of me thinks we're fools to trust either of the, Hapexamendios or His Reconciler. If He was such a loving God, why did He do so much harm? And don't tell me He moves in mysterious ways because that's so much horse shit and we both know it. ”
― Clive Barker

“Behind stone, with stone, carrying stone”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volume Three

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore. —André Gide, The Counterfeiters”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“A monster lies in wait in me,
A stew of wounds and misery,
But fiercer still in life and limb,
The me that lies in wait in him.”
― Clive Barker

“Outside, somewhere near, the world would soon be waking. He had watched it wake from the window of this very room, day after day, stirring itself to another round of fruitless pursuits, and he’d known, known, that there was nothing left out there to excite him.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Yet the stories moved her. She couldn’t deny it. And they moved her in a way only *true* things could. It wasn’t sentiment that brought tears to her eyes. The stories weren’t sentimental. They were tough, even cruel. No, what made her weep was being reminded of an inner life she’d been so familiar with as a child; a life that was both an escape from, and revenge upon, the pains and frustrations of childhood; a life that was neither mawkish nor unknowing; a life of mind-places - haunted, soaring – that she’d chosen to forget when she’d took up the cause of adulthood.”
― Clive Barker, Weave World

“Kaufman calculated the risks of his situation: the mathematics of panic.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“They knew a lot, the dead. How many times had she said to Harry they were the world’s greatest untapped resource? It was true. All they’d seen, all they’d suffered, all they’d triumphed over—lost to a world in need of wisdom. And why? Because at a certain point in the evolution of the species a profound superstition was sewn into the human heart that the dead were to be considered sources of terror rather than enlightenment.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“If (when) she got back to her typewriter she'd begin these tongue-in-cheek screenplays over from the top, 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

“No tears, please. It’s a waste of good suffering.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“You want my advice!
Kiss the Devil, eat the worm. -- Jan de Mooy, Another Matter; or, Man Remade”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Peter Pan has to be the book of my childhood. Come to think of it, it's the book of my adulthood too. It's a book which, in the reading of it, takes me back to editions that I've had and lost, with various illustrators' work in them. It brings back moments sitting reading it with my mother. It brings back my first contact with the Disney cartoon. It brings back standing in the play-yard when I was a kid, when the wind was really blowing, and closing my eyes, spreading my arms and pretending I could fly. It brings back childhood dreams of flying. It brings back the first encounter I ever had with an invented world... Never Never Land was really the first journey I took to an invented world which I believed in wholly and completely. I remember the immense solidarity that I felt with the Lost Boys, with Peter, with the Indians - how much I wanted to be a Red Indian - how much the saving of Tiger Lily meant to me as a kid, how much I wanted to one day wake up and save an Indian squaw from drowning.”
― Clive Barker

“What did I see? It's no use telling you there are no words. Of course there are words; there are always words. The question is: can I wield them well enough to evoke the power of what I witnessed? That I doubt. But let me do my best.”
― Clive Barker, Galilee

“To every hour, its mystery. At dawn, the riddles of life and light. At noon, the conundrums of solidity. At three, in the hum and heat of the day, a phantom moon, already high. At dusk, memory. And at midnight? Oh, then the enigma of time itself; of a day that will never come again passing into history while we sleep.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“The bare bulb in the middle of the room dimmed and brightened, brightened and dimmed again. It had taken on the rhythm of the bell, burning its hottest on each chime. In the troughs between the chimes the darkness in the room became utter; it was as if the world he had occupied for twenty-nine years had ceased to exist. Then the bell would sound again, and the bulb burn so strongly it might never have faltered, and for a few precious seconds he was standing in a familiar place, with a door that led out and down and into the street, and a window through which-had he but the will (or strength) to tear the blinds back-he might glimpse a rumor of morning.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“War is but a continuation of diplomacy by alternate means.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“Nothing's perfect... because time passes... and the beetle and the worm find their way into everything sooner or later.”
― Clive Barker, The Thief of Always

“Quitoon knew the world well. It wasn't jut Humankind and its works he knew, but all manner of things without any clear connection between them. He knew about spices, parliaments, salamanders, lullabies, curses, forms of discourse and disease; of riddles, chains, and sanities; ways to make sweetmeats, love and widows; tales to tell children, tales to tell their parents, tales to tell yourself on days when everything you know means nothing.”
― Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone

“Before she could look to find a wound he had control of the vision once again, but like a juggler attempting to hold too many balls in the air catching one meant loosing another.”
― Clive Barker, The Great and Secret Show

“Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs. The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator’s voice recedes, the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making. Thus the pagan will be sanctified, the tragic become laughable; great lovers will stoop to sentiment, and demons dwindle to clockwork toys. Nothing is fixed. In and out the shuttle goes fact and fiction, mind and matter, woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that hidden amongst them is a filigree which will with time become a world.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“You're damned if you can't forgive, Jude.”
― Clive Barker

“I really believe that there is an enormous appetite amongst readers for an originality of vision. In other words, be true to your own dreams and there will always be people who want to hear them.”
― Clive Barker

“So discretion was the by-word. They would take meant only when the hunger became crippling, and only then victims who were unlikely to be missed. They would refrain from infecting others, so as no to advertise their presence. if one was found, no other would risk exposure by going to his aid. Hard laws o live by, but not as hard as the consequences of breaking them. The rest was patience, and they were well used to that. Their liberator would come eventually, if they could only survive the wait. Few had any clue as to the shape he'd come in. But all knew his name. Cabal, he was called. Who Unmade Midian. Their prayers were full of him. On the next wind, let him come. If not now, then tomorrow. They might not have prayed so passionately had they known what a sea change his coming would bring. They might not have prayed at all had the know they prayed to themselves. But these were revelations for a later day. For now, they had simpler concerns. Keeping the children from the roofs at night, the bereaved from crying out too loud, the young in summer from falling in love with the human. It was a life.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“There was no harm done; and what would a Resurrection be without a few laughs?”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“Sometimes, of course, the war required that he be cruel, but what cause worth fighting for did not require cruelty of its champions once in a while?”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Keep it simple. Trust your imagination. Discover what is unique about your imagination. Don’t simply read a story and copy it.
I go into myself. Then I transcribe what visions I have. If those ideas are original, and you are devoted, you will go far.”
― Clive Barker

“I don't like crowds of any kind. A dinner party of more than six people is not, for me, a pleasure. I get less social as I get older... I am very resistant to anything that keeps me away from the business of making these journeys into the fantastique. They are my reason for being on the planet, as far as I can comprehend, and I pursue them to the cost of almost anything.”
― Clive Barker

“If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke — Aye, and what then? —S. T. Coleridge, Anima Poetae”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“What we want to believe and what is true are, I think, more closely related than the Rationalists would sometimes have us believe.”
― Clive Barker

“Sometimes you need to let things strike your heart and not your head.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat