Clive Barker famous quotes

We are all our own graveyards, I believe; 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 are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.
-- Clive Barker

#Believe #Past #People

Did I say that she was beautiful? I was wrong. Beauty is too tame a notion; it evokes only faces in magazines. A lovely eloquence, a calming symmetry; none of that describes this woman’s face. So perhaps I should assume I cannot do it justice with words. Suffice it to say that it would break your heart to see her; and it would mend what was broken in the same moment; and you would be twice what you’d been before.
-- Clive Barker

#Beautiful #Heart #Broken

I don't like PG-13 horror movies. I think they're a contradiction in terms.
-- Clive Barker

#Thinking #Horror #Contradiction

She had opened a door... and now she was walking with demons. And at the end of her travels, she would have her revenge... Pain had made a ***** of her.
-- Clive Barker

#Pain #Revenge #Doors

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

#Lying #Waiting #Monsters

You cut up a thing that's alive and beautiful to find out how it's alive and why it's beautiful, and before you know it, it's neither of those things, and you're standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it.
-- Clive Barker

#Beautiful #Cutting #Sight

Everything is in flux: everything changes; the body changes, the soul changes. We are capable of extraordinary self-transmutat ion and internal self-transforma tion.
-- Clive Barker

#Self #Ions #Soul

I firmly believe that a story is only as good as the villain.
-- Clive Barker

#Believe #Stories #Villain

To dream in isolation can be properly splendid to be sure; but to dream in company seems to me infinitely preferable.
-- Clive Barker

#Dream #Isolation #Splendid

We’re too much ourselves. Afraid of letting go of what we are, in case we are nothing, and holding on so tight, we lose everything else.
-- Clive Barker

#Letting Go #Too Much #Holding On

Those old hypocrites. They talk about killing witches but the Good Book’s full of magic. Turning the Nile to blood and parting the Red Sea. What’s that if it’s not good old-fashioned magic? Want a little water into wine? No trouble! How about raising the dead man Lazarus? Just say the word!
-- Clive Barker

#Book #Wine #Hypocrite

..She had that brand of pragmatism that would find her the first brewing tea after Armageddon.
-- Clive Barker

#Tea #Firsts #Armageddon

[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.
-- Clive Barker

#Life #Believe #Scary

I want to be remembered as an imaginer, someone who used his imagination as a way to journey beyond the limits of self, beyond the limits of flesh and blood, beyond the limits of even perhaps life itself, in order to discover some sense of order in what appears to be a disordered universe. I'm using my imagination to find meaning, both for myself and, I hope, for my readers."-Clive Barker
-- Clive Barker

#Journey #Self #Blood

any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.
-- Clive Barker

#Love #Sad #Art

Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.
-- Clive Barker

#Halloween #Book #Equality

Nothing else wounds so deeply and irreparably. Nothing else robs us of hope so much as being unloved by one we love
-- Clive Barker

#Love #Unloved #Wounds

I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories. This is a gift from God, who spoke our species into being, but left the end of our story untold. That mystery is troubling to us. How could it be otherwise? Without the final part, we think, how are we to make sense of all that went before: which is to say, our lives? So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.
-- Clive Barker

#Men #Thinking #Animal

Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any story springs. The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and 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.
-- Clive Barker

#Spring #Voice #Age

Evil, however powerful it seemed,could be undone by its own appetite
-- Clive Barker

#Powerful #Evil #Undone

Zombies are the liberal nightmare. Here you have the masses, whom you would love to love, appearing at your front door with their faces falling off; and you're trying to be as humane as you possibly can, but they are, after all, eating the cat. And the fear of mass activity, of mindlessness on a national scale, underlies my fear of zombies.
-- Clive Barker

#Fall #Cat #Doors

You just have to trust your own madness.
-- Clive Barker

#Hate #Madness #I Hate You

Sooner or later even the most ambitious glutton must crawl away and seek the solace of the vomitorium.
-- Clive Barker

#Ambitious #Solace #Sooner Or Later

Believe me, when I say; There are no two powers That command the soul. One is God The other is the tide. -Anon From the novel Abarat
-- Clive Barker

#Believe #Two #Soul

I haven't even had a life I could call my own, and you're ready to slot me into the grand design. Well, I don't think I want to go. I want to be my own design.
-- Clive Barker

#Thinking #Design #Want

Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.
-- Clive Barker

#Spring #Writing #Stories

Let the mad find wisdom in their madness for the sane, and let the sane be grateful.
-- Clive Barker

#Grateful #Mad #Sane

That which is imagined can never be lost.
-- Clive Barker

#Lost

Sung to the tune of O Christmas Tree O woe is me, O woe is me, I used to have a hamster tree, But it was eaten by a newt, And now I have no cuddly fruit, O woe is me, O woe is me, I used to have a hamster tree!
-- Clive Barker

#Tree #Tunes #Woe

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

#Thinking #Fiction #Way

All things are true. God's an Astronaut. Oz is Over the Rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters live." - Peloquin
-- Clive Barker

#Rainbow #Monsters #Horror

Darkness always had its part to play. Without it, how would we know when we walked in the light? It’s only when its ambitions become too grandiose that it must be opposed, disciplined, sometimes—if necessary—brought down for a time. Then it will rise again, as it must.
-- Clive Barker

#Ambition #Light #Play

I can see in your eyes that there’s no seam of untapped joy left in you. The best of life has come and gone. Those days when sudden epiphanies swept over you, and you had visions of the rightness of all things and of your place amongst them; they’re history. You’re in a darker place now.
-- Clive Barker

#Eye #Joy #Over You

Walk with care in dark places, and do not put your faith in anyone who promises you the forgiveness of the Lord or a certain place in Paradise.
-- Clive Barker

#Dark #Promise #Care

There is no such thing as originality. It has all been said before, suffered before. If a person knows that, is it any wonder love becomes mechanical and death just a scene to be shunned? There is no absolute knowledge to be gained from either. Just another ride on the merry-go-round, another blurred scene of faces smiling and faces grieved.
-- Clive Barker

#Faces #Originality #Wonder

I've learned two things in my life. One that love is the beginning and end of all meaning. And two that it is the same thing whatever shape our souls have taken on this journey. Love is love. Is love.
-- Clive Barker

#Taken #Journey #Love Is

We are the star and the darkness it peirces
-- Clive Barker

#Stars #Darkness

Have patience; the lovers will suffer lovers always suffer.
-- Clive Barker

#Suffering #Lovers #Having Patience

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

#Wall #Moon #Color

After all, where can the glorious, the goofy, and the god-like stand shoulder to shoulder?
-- Clive Barker

#Goofy #Shoulders #Glorious

‎"Magic is the first and last religion of the world. It has the power to make us whole, to open our eyes to the Dominions and return us to ourselves. Everything that isn't us is also ourselves. We're joined to everything that was, is and will be. From one end of the Imajica to another. From the tiniest mote dancing over this flame to the Godhead Itself.
-- Clive Barker

#Eye #Flames #Dancing

Fear is a place where you just tell the truth
-- Clive Barker

#Telling The Truth

But I think humans are innately religious as a species, so you don't need a specific excuse for examining the perversely unholy.
-- Clive Barker

#Religious #Thinking #Needs

All I ever wanted to do is darken the day and brighten the night
-- Clive Barker

#Night #Wanted

Make your own worlds. Make your own laws. Make your own creations, your own star systems. Don't feel answerable to anyone, or as though you have to create after some preordained model. You don't have to write like myself, or King or Anne Rice: be yourself. Nothing is more wonderful than discovering a new voice, particularly if it happens to be your own.
-- Clive Barker

#Being Yourself #Kings #Stars

I've always thought that the most extraordinary special effect you could do is to buy a child at the moment of its birth, sit it on a little chair and say, "You'll have three score years and ten," and take a photograph every minute. "And we'll watch you and photograph you for ten years after you die, then we'll run the film." Wouldn't that be extraordinary? We'd watch this thing get bigger and bigger, and flower to become extraordinary and beautiful, then watch it crumble, decay, and rot.
-- Clive Barker

#Beautiful #Running #Children

I was a weird little kid. I was very irritable, bored, frustrated. I felt my imagination bubbling inside my head without having any way to express itself. Given a crayon and paper, I would not draw a train or a house. I would draw these monsters, beasts and demons.
-- Clive Barker

#Kids #Bored #Imagination

My imagination is my polestar; I steer by that.
-- Clive Barker

#Imagination #My Imagination

The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.
-- Clive Barker

#Beautiful #Eye #People

Journey to the end of day, Come the fire-fly, Come the moon; Say a prayer for God's good grace And sleep with lore upon your face.
-- Clive Barker

#Prayer #Sleep #Moon

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

#Past #Done #Littles

Three is the number of those who do holy work; Two is the number of those who do lover's work; One is the number of those who do perfect evil Or perfect good.
-- Clive Barker

#Two #Numbers #Evil

Welcome to the worst nightmare of all, reality!
-- Clive Barker

#Reality #Welcome #Nightmare

Often people who are wonderful with animals aren't always terribly good with human beings.
-- Clive Barker

#Animal #People #Wonderful

You are my beauty, my body, perfected. All I was drained off into you. When you left, my health went with you - leaving a moral morbidity I smell in my sleep. The acts I committed for the love of you. Acts I can never forget. I crawled into the bellies of the dead to fish out a little life... I have an appetite for it now. I have an unrelenting lust for death.
-- Clive Barker

#Sleep #Smell #Leaving

A soul of water a soul of stone. A soul by name a soul unknown. The hours unmake our flesh our bone. The Soul is all and all alone!
-- Clive Barker

#Names #Water #Soul

The great grey beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.
-- Clive Barker

#Alive #February #Beast

Harvey wasn't interested in the clothes, it was the masks that mesmerized him. They were like snowflakes: no two alike. Some were made of wood and of plastic; some of straw and cloth and papier-mâché. Some were as bright as parrots, others as pale as parchment. Some were so grotesque he was certain they'd been carved by crazy people; others so perfect they looked like the death masks of angels. There were masks of clowns and foxes, masks like skulls decorated with real teeth, and one with carved flames instead of hair.
-- Clive Barker

#Crazy #Real #Angel

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

#Love #Dust #Lust

There is no delight the equal of dread
-- Clive Barker

#Delight #Equal #Dread

There must still be room for the falling note, of course. Even in an undying world there are times when beauty passes from sight, or love passes from the heart, and we feel the sorrow of partition.
-- Clive Barker

#Fall #Heart #Sight

…there’s nothing in the world more fun than doing something you’re good at.
-- Clive Barker

#Fun #World

Give me B movies or give me death!
-- Clive Barker

#Giving

Well, here he was. They could save each other, the way the poets promised lovers should. He was mystery, he was darkness, he was all she had dreamed of. And if she would only free him he would service her - oh yes - until her pleasure reached that threshold that, like all thresholds, was a place where the strong grew stronger, and the weak perished. Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa. And he knew it well enough to call it home.
-- Clive Barker

#Strong #Pain #Home

No tears, please. It's a waste of good suffering.
-- Clive Barker

#Suffering #Tears #Waste

With the inevitability of a tongue returning to probe a painful tooth, we come back and back and back again to our fears, sitting to talk them over with the eagerness of a hungry man before a full and steaming plate.
-- Clive Barker

#Men #Teeth #Sitting

She was a sea: and I had to swim in her.
-- Clive Barker

#Sea #Swim

It’s only when you’ve lost someone that you realize the nonsense of that phrase “It’s a small world”. It isn’t. It’s a vast, devouring world, especially if you’re alone.
-- Clive Barker

#Phrases #World #Realizing

In this sense love is of a different order to any other phenomenon, for it may be both an event and a sign of that invisible mechanism I spoke of before; perhaps the finest sign, the most certain. In it’s throes we need neither luck nor science. We are the wheel, and the man who profits by it. We are the star, and the darkness it pierces. We are the butterfly, brief and beautiful.
-- Clive Barker

#Beautiful #Stars #Butterfly

Of course it’s the apparently tranquil periods that deceive us. Though our instruments or our senses or our wits may not be able to see the processes that are leading toward these clusters of events, they’re happening. The star, the wheel, the butterfly—all are in a subtle state of unrest, waiting for the moment when some invisible mechanism signals that the time has come. Then the star explodes; the wheel makes poor men rich; the butterfly mates and dies.
-- Clive Barker

#Stars #Butterfly #Men

Whatever capacity she possesses to supernaturally beguile a human soul—and she possesses many—she liked his clear-sightedness too well, to blind him that way.
-- Clive Barker

#Soul #Way #Blind

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

#Regret #Too Late #Done

A man kills the thing he loves, and he must die a little himself.
-- Clive Barker

#Men #Littles

Writing about the unholy is one way of writing about what is sacred.
-- Clive Barker

#Life #Writing #Sacred

Mischief nodded. 'It's true,' he conceded. 'You're in the company of eight world-class thieves,' he said, not without a little touch of pride. 'Saints we are not.' But then,' said Deaux-Deaux, 'who is?' he thought on this. 'Besides saints.
-- Clive Barker

#Pride #Eight #Class

Nothing happens carelessly. We’re not brought into the world without reason, even though we may never understand the reason. An infant that lives an hour, that dies before it can lay eyes on those who made it, even that soul did not live without purpose: this is my sudden certainty.
-- Clive Barker

#Eye #Soul #Purpose