Famous Quotes & Sayings

Clive Barker Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Clive Barker.

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Famous Quotes By Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1703288

Indifference was the best remedy. Once you conceded defeat, life was a feather bed. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1433650

He spoke of both dancing and death with equal nonchalance, as though one carried as little significance as the other. It calmed her, hearing him talk that way. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 2073235

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

Clive Barker Quotes 1994235

It was the pivotal teaching of Pluthero Quexos, the most celebrated dramatist of the Second Dominion, that in any fiction, no matter how ambitious its scope or profound its theme, there was only ever room for three players. Between warring kings, a peacemaker; between adoring spouses, a seducer or a child. Between twins, the spirit of the womb. Between lovers, Death. Greater numbers might drift through the drama, of course
thousands in fact
but they could only ever be phantoms, agents, or, on rare occasions, reflections of the three real and self-willed beings who stood at the center. And even this essential trio would not remain intact; or so he taught. It would steadily diminish as the story unfolded, three becoming two, two becoming one, until the stage was left deserted. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1424683

Her streak of independence, which had first brought her to this unfriendly city, was in studied defiance of her smothering appetite for security. If she gave in to those loving appeals she knew she would take root in domestic soil and not look up and out again for another year. In which time, what adventures might have passed her by? — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1516493

Words are sexier than flesh. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1338196

It feels like I've died," he said to Caz when he'd finished.
"Well, you didn't."
"And I should be grateful, right?"
"Right."
"Well, I'm not. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1175289

Make a fist. Lightly. Leave enough room for a breath to pass through. Good. Good. All magic proceeds from breath. Remember that. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1638443

Perhaps the House had heard Harvey wishing for a full moon, because when he and Wendell traipsed upstairs and looked out the landing window, there
hanging between the bare branches of the trees
was a moon as wide and as white as a dead man's smile. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 2181563

All I've ever wanted to do is darken the day and brighten the night. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 428555

Was enough to know they had no Devil on their backs. Just old humanity, cheated of love, and ready to pull down the world on its head. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 709855

By and large I think art is made by people who have discipline married to talent in sufficiently large amounts to work even if they don't feel like it. Anybody can get maudlin and decide to write poetry at 11 at night; the question is, can you do it at 8:30 on a Monday morning..? — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 239153

Perhaps a wiser eye than hers would be able to read tomorrow in tonight's stars, but where was the fun in that? It was better not to know. Better to be alive in the Here and the Now
in this bright, laughing moment
and let the Hours to come take care of themselves. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1961109

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

Clive Barker Quotes 814887

We're both thieves, Harvey Swick. I take time. You take lives. But in the end we're the same: both Thieves of Always. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 237606

When it was all done, Suzanna found her voice, thanking both the grave diggers and their mothers. "After all that digging," said the eldest of the girls, "I just hope he grows." "He will," said her mother, with no trace of indulgence. "They always do." On — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1563248

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

Clive Barker Quotes 1502390

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

Clive Barker Quotes 1184159

Handwriting everything, for me, is psychologically useful because it keeps my writing economical. I think there are word processor styles emerging. Something does seem to happen to a writer's style when he works on a word processor. When you hand write a thing the size of Weaveworld (584 pages) you want to make sure every word counts because it's such a huge labour to get it down. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1758009

Not a classic reunion. The lover, on seeing his beloved, throws up down his shirt. But then, nothing that happened between Jacqueline and myself was ever quite normal. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 441748

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

Clive Barker Quotes 397622

Men and your hunts," Lilith went on, addressing, it seemed, some larger error in the Duke's sex. "If you hadn't been out killing healthy stags and boars in the first place, you could have married and lived and loved. But" - she shrugged - "we do as our instincts dictate, yes? And yours brought you here. To the very edge of your own grave. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 817307

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

Clive Barker Quotes 2257170

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

Clive Barker Quotes 903424

The sun rose like a stripper, keeping its glory well covered by cloud till it seemed there'd be no show at all. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 381838

He got to his feet and stumbled away from the stench of his vomit, making his way through this graveyard of old glories, heading for the darkest place he could find in which to hide his giddy head. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 2165178

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

Clive Barker Quotes 691825

What do the good know?' he said. 'Except what the bad teach them by their excesses? — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1659449

Nothing, I had come to believe by the end, was more illusory than the idea of ending. — Clive Barker

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It was that sleep itself - the act of closing the eyes and relinquishing control of her consciousness - was something she was temperamentally unsuited to. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 393514

We always think we are right, and - search as I have - there is no evil under the sun that somebody somewhere won't argue is actually a good, no idiocy that hasn't got its perfectly serious defenders, and no tyrant, past or present - no matter how bloody - without some bunch of zealot schmucks to defend him or his reputation till the last breath in their bodies - or preferably somebody else's. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1355626

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

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You can plan to be brave - it's even better if you just try to be brave. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1045902

Always, worlds within worlds. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1557656

I dreamt a limitless book,
A book unbound,
Its leaves scattered in fantastic abundance
On every line there was a new horizon drawn,
New heavens supposed;
New states, new souls. — Clive Barker

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Her mother had always said that women, being more at peace with themselves than men, needed fewer distractions from their hurts. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1667234

Your kind has a superstitious terror of things ugly and broken; you fear that their condition may somehow infect you. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1964304

He lay with a pack of panting dogs on a hill overlooking plains where antelope grazed. He marched with ants, and labored in the rigors of the nest, filing eggs. He danced the mating dance of the bower bird, and slept on a warm rock with his lizard kin. He was a cloud. He was the shadow of a cloud. He was the moon that cast the shadow of a cloud. He was a blind fish; he was a shoal; he was a whale; he was the sea. He was the lord of all he surveyed. He was a worm in the dung of a kite. He did not grieve, knowing his life was a day long, or an hour. He did not wonder who made him. He did not wish to be other. He did not pray. He did not hope. He only was, and was, and was, and that was the joy of it. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1525259

Behind stone, with stone, carrying stone — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1511264

We wouldn't eat an important person like you. Sometimes we'll take a sailor, but - " He shrugged. " - so would you if it was always fish. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1711695

Memory, prophecy, and fantasy - The past, the future, and The dreaming moment between - Are all in one country, Living one immortal day. To know that is Wisdom. To use it is the Art. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 2166787

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

Clive Barker Quotes 2266591

I have such sights to show you. Soon, you will have answers to questions you have never even dared to ask. — Clive Barker

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Help me', he said, like a lost child.
Go to Hell, the room respectfully replied; and for the first time in his life, he knew exactly what that meant. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 2262317

My father used to say: Every bird is one bird, and every book is one book, and every bird and every book is one thing too, under the words and the feathers. He finished with a flourish, as though the meaning of this was self-evident. — Clive Barker

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Perhaps sunlight had always been luminous, and doorways signs of greater passage than that of one room to another. But she'd not noticed it until now. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 2240536

I remember when I watched 'Hellraiser' with my mother. She cried when she saw my name in the opening credits, and I had to tell her that that was the happiest she was going to be for the next two hours. — Clive Barker

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Logic is the last refuge of a coward. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 2208496

In my Art
I have but
one fear:
that we will
fail to be
fearless. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 2200098

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

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Kaufman calculated the risks of his situation: the mathematics of panic. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1736193

Your kind has a supersitious terror of things ugly and broken; you gear that their conditon may somehow infect you. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 2111640

I was born alive. Isn't that punishment enough? — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 2105396

I'm a poet,' the young man said, 'And it's my job to remember the sadness of things. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 2032312

It was bad enough that these creatures had children and art; that they might also have vision was too dangerous a thought to entertain. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1987421

And in time it will be as though men had never come to this perfect corner of the world - never called it paradise on earth, never despoiled it with their dream factories; and in the golden hush of the afternoon all that will be heard will be the flittering of dragonflies, and the murmur of hummingbirds as they pass from bower to bower, looking for a place to sup sweetness. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1985793

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

Clive Barker Quotes 1138781

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

Clive Barker Quotes 1931939

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

Clive Barker Quotes 1931746

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

Clive Barker Quotes 1770586

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

Clive Barker Quotes 475752

The Monastery of the Cenobitical Order was a large-walled compound built seven hundred thousand years ago on a damned-made hill of stone and cement. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 692931

Anybody can shrug and say life is just some accident of mud and lightning. But Henry, it isn't. And I mean to show you, in the time we have together
whether it's an hour or a day of whatever it is
I mean to show you that you just have to open your heart and look
you hear me, look
and you'll see every minute a hundred reasons to believe."
"Oh, will you?" Henry said, irritated by Diamanda's tone. "And where will I find these hundred reasons?"
"Everywhere!" Diamanda said. "Don't you see we're born into a pattern so huge and so beautiful and so full of meaning we can only hope to understand a tiny part of it in the seventy or eighty years we live with breath in our bodies? But one day, it will all come clear. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 675171

Maybe the man had taken the wrong turning, but at least he'd travelled some extraordinary roads. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 673115

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

Clive Barker Quotes 658174

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

Clive Barker Quotes 613916

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

Clive Barker Quotes 611945

And to think, she'd once had the hots for him, back in the old days (six months ago) when razor-thin men with noses like Durante and an encyclopaedic knowledge of de Niro movies had really been her style. Now she saw him for what he was, flotsam from a lost ship of hope. Still a pill-freak, still a theoretical bisexual, still devoted to early Polanski movies and symbolic pacifism. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 595529

People are like books. Everywhere they're opened, they're read. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 573755

What I tried to do is deliver movies that have worked for me more than once. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 550409

I don't like to make a distinction between the writer and the painter , finally , because I do both things anyway . Everybody's dreaming and trying to put down their dreams in the way that their hand knows best . I feel as much a unity , as much comradeship , with painters as I do writers . — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 699218

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

Clive Barker Quotes 422896

Lost in the wasteland, Ashbery was found by a light flickering up from between the fractured paving stones. Its beams were bitterly cold, and sticky in a way light had no right to be, adhering to his sleeve and hand before fading away. Intrigued, he tracked its source from one eruption to another, each point brighter than the one before. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 375211

To call you excrement would be an insult to the product of my bowels. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 299958

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

Clive Barker Quotes 217141

It was what his mother would have done in the circumstances. Boiled some fresh water, warmed the pot and counted out the spoonfuls of tea. Setting domestic order against the chaos, in the hope of winning some temporary reprieve from the vale of tears. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 193527

But she felt as though whatever she'd been given in the Devil's Country it was affecting her mind, not her body, and it was not doing anything remotely healing. Quite the reverse. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 186420

The things I will invent will be, I suspect, mundane by comparison with the truth. And as I said, it's my intention that you should not know the difference. I plan to interweave the elements of my story so cunningly that you'll cease to even care whether an event happened out there in the same world where you walk, or in here, in the head of a crippled man who will never again move from his stepmother's house. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 174562

Was that the point about scattering ashes: that in the end they looked the same? Not just the snout and the tail, but a dog's ashes and a man's ashes. All reducible, with the addition of a little flame, to this mottled dust? — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 167062

True joy is a profound remembering; and true grief the same. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 92223

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

Clive Barker Quotes 968654

I can certainly throw out some observation about the process of creating which may be of use. Firstly, it's the best & the worst of worlds, because the only fuel you have to make the fire blaze on the page / screen is the stuff of your own being. An artist consumes his or herself in the act of making art. I can feel that consumption even now, sitting here at my desk at the end of a working day. In order to generate the ideas that I have set on the page for the last 10 or 11 hours I have burned the fuel of my own history. This is, obviously a double-edged sword. In order to give, the artist must take from himself. That's the deal. And it's very important to me that the work I do is the best I can make it, because I know what is being burned up to create. As the villain of Sacrament says: living & dying, we feed the fire. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1303868

Watching the ice-floes dance together on the black water. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1295908

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

Clive Barker Quotes 1248074

The century's getting old and stale; it needs new tribes. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 85153

Behind their eyes the hope was sickening and in many, dead. They lived from event to event with a subtle terror of the gap between, filling up their lives with distractions to avoid the emptiness where curiosity should have been. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1106525

When, finally, she did sleep, it was the slumber of a watcher and waiter. Light, and full of sighs. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1068762

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

Clive Barker Quotes 1036941

Talk of Power and Might would always attract an audience. Lords never went out of fashion. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 998862

A sweet slip of a girl like you, why should you have to know anything about the sorrow of the world? You just believe me when I tell you ... there's no way to live your life to the full and not have a reason to shed a tear now and again. It's not a bad feeling, child. That's what a lament does. It makes you feel happy to be sad, in a strange way. D'you see? — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 970776

Its face crinkled up grotesquely, the eyes narrowing like those of a laughing Buddha, the lips peeling back to expose a sickle of brilliant teeth. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 1310434

[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

Clive Barker Quotes 884371

I am not your Father. I am but a child, like you. Afraid, like you. Fearing sometimes, as you fear. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 870903

Here are the stories written on the Book of Blood. They are a map of that dark highway that leads out of life towards unknown destinations. Few will have to take it, most will go on peacefully along lamplit streets, ushered out of living with prayers and caresses. But for a few, a chosen few, the horrors will come, skipping to fetch them off to the highway of the damned ... — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 836726

You're damned if you can't forgive, Jude. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 819174

Good horror fiction deals with taboos. It must always go to the limits of what is acceptable. — Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes 799985

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

Clive Barker Quotes 726168

The Devil is by no means the worst that there is; I would rather have dealings with him than with many a human being. He honours his agreements much more promptly than many a swindler on Earth. To be true, when payment is due he comes on the dot; just as twelve strikes, fetches his soul and goes off home to Hell like a good Devil. He's just a businessman as is right and proper. - -J.N. NESTROY, Hollenangst — Clive Barker

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They will all abandon you. All you have left is my desire for you. — Clive Barker

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The pain, I can assure you, will be exquisite. — Clive Barker