Clive Barker quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, Clive Barker has a lot to say. In this list we present the 75 best Clive Barker quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
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Clive Barker quotes
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, Days of Magic, Nights of War
I dreamed I spoke in another’s language, I dreamed I lived in another’s skin, I dreamed I was my own beloved, I dreamed I was a tiger’s kin.I dreamed that Eden lived inside me, And when I breathed a garden came, I dreamed I knew all of Creation, I dreamed I knew the Creator’s name.I dreamed–and this dream was the finest–That all I dreamed was real and true, And we would live in joy forever, You in me, and me in you.
— Clive Barker, Days of Magic, Nights of War
Nothing else wounds so deeply and irreparably. Nothing else robs us of hope so much as being unloved by one we love
— Clive Barker
[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
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, Sacrament
Writing about the unholy is one way of writing about what is sacred.
— Clive Barker
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, Weaveworld
Here is a list of terrible things, The jaws of sharks, a vultures wingsThe rabid bite of the dogs of war, The voice of one who went before, But most of all the mirror’s gaze, Which counts us out our numbered days.
— Clive Barker, Days of Magic, Nights of War
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
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 is great good health to believe as the Hindus do that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one s dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical. It is sickness of the profoundest kind to believe that there is one reality. There is sickness in any piece of work or any piece of art seriously attempting to suggest that the idea that there is more than one reality is somehow redundant.
— Clive Barker
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, The Thief of Always
Funny that. We live in islands of Hours and we never seem to have time enough for anything…
— Clive Barker, Absolute Midnight
Is there any good news?’ Tesla
— Clive Barker, The Great and Secret Show
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
In my ArtI have butone fear:that we willfail to befearless.
— Clive Barker, Tonight, Again
Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we’re opened, we’re red.
— Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three
Sometimes nature is even crueller than politics.
— Clive Barker, Tonight, Again
The pain, I can assure you, will be exquisite.
— Clive Barker, The Forbidden
I know many a strong man undone by marriage.
— Clive Barker, Tonight, Again
There are things that are more important than the news and what’s happening today. There are these archetypes which are part of the human imagination since humans were presumably imaginative. And I think that’s what [people] find touching, these eternal ideas. It’s one of the things that makes fantasy something that tends to stand the test of time because we’re reading, 50 years later, The Lord of the Rings.
— Clive Barker
That’s half of your trouble, ” muttered the crocodile. “You believe everything’s true.””That’s because everything is, ” replied Mr. Bacchus.
— Clive Barker
The great grey beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.
— Clive Barker, The Thief of Always
We’re making strange fictions of strange things inside ourselves.
— Clive Barker
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
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
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, Abarat
you must be careful with kindness. It’s usually mistaken for weakness by stupid people.
— Clive Barker, Days of Magic, Nights of War
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, Days of Magic, Nights of War
Men. Young men. Legal age, mind you. But young nonetheless. And it’s not what you think. When we meet, we make … magic.
— Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels
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
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, Days of Magic, Nights of War
Wherever I go, I will speak of you with love.
— Clive Barker, The Thief of Always
Meaning is always a latecomer. Beauty and music seduce us first; later ashamed of our own sensuality, we insist on meaning.
— Clive Barker, Galilee
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, Mister B. Gone
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, Abarat
All Darkness was one darkness in the end. Of heart or Heavens, one Darkness.
— Clive Barker, Cabal
Evil is never abstract. It is always concrete, always particular and always vested in individuals. To deny monsters as individuals the right to speak, to actually state their case, is perverse – because I want to hear the Devil speak. I like the idea that a point of view can be made by the dark side.
— Clive Barker
Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise. Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for something to quench its heat, and the mellowest of autumns will tire of gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its fruitfulness. Even winter — the hardest season, the most implacable — dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.
— Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart
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, Abarat
All things are true. God’s an Astronaut. Oz is Over the Rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters live.” – Peloquin
— Clive Barker
Dorothea: “What the fuck are you?”Nix: “A man who wanted to be a God…then changed his mind.
— Clive Barker
Kaufman almost smiled at the perfection of its horror. He felt an offer of insanity tickling the base of his skull, tempting him into oblivion, promising a blank indifference to the world.
— Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume One
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, Books of Blood, Volumes 4-6
Living in Hell kept him aware of the possibility of Heaven, and he’d never felt more alive.
— Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels
The dead have highways.” Clive Barker
— Clive Barker
You’ve always got me”“Always?”“Didn’t I just say so?”“Yes”“Am I liar? ““No.” I lied.
— Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone
Now, I don’t believe that a god exists. I think that gods are creation of men, by men, and for men. What has happened over the many centuries now, the better part of two thousand in fact, is that God has been slowly and steadily accruing power. His church has been accruing power, and the men who run that church, and they are all men, are not about to give it up. If they give it up, they give up luxury, they give up comfort.
— Clive Barker
She had witnessed in nauseating detail how the human world worked: its rituals of comfort (television, food, religion); its appetite for poison (television, food, religion); and for the monstrous edifices of desire (television, food, religion): she understood them all.
— Clive Barker, Absolute Midnight
I have deeper journeys to take. Metaphysical journeys to see Christ. Shaman journeys. It’s what I have been elected by God to do.
— 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
As to my mouth, of all my features, I wish I could possess my mouth again, just as it had been before the fire. I had my mother’s lips, generous below and above; and what kissing I had practiced, mainly on my hand or on a lonely pig, had convinced me that my lips would be the source of my good fortune. I would kiss with them, and lie with them, I would make victims and willing slaves of anyone my eyes desired, simply by talking a little, and following the talk with kisses, and the kisses with demands. And they’d melt into compliance, everyone of them, happy to perform the most demeaning acts as long as I was there to reward them with a long, tongue-tied kiss when they were done. But the fire didn’t spare my lips; it took them too, erasing them utterly.
— Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone
The flawlessly beautiful were flawlessy happy, weren’t they? To Kristy this had always seemed self-evident. Tonight, however, the alcohol made her wonder if envy hadn’t blinded her. Perhaps to be flawless was another kind of sadness.
— Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart
One man’s pornography is another man’s theology.
— Clive Barker
Let’s prioritise here. At the risk of stating the obvious, this isn’t going to be easy. We need to find Norma as fast as we can, avoid the powerful demon that wants me as his slave, and then get the fuck out of Hell. I’m sure we’ll encounter some heinous, unthinkable, soul-scarring shit along the way, but hopefully we make it out alive.
— Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels
Born from different parents, they were siblings in death, destroyed by the same hand.
— Clive Barker, Cabal
I was cured in my new infamy of all the tired wisdom of age. I would never weary into that tired state again—I swore to myself, I would always be this raw, wet child hereafter…
— Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone
Dream!Forge yourself and riseOut of your mind and into others.Men, be women.Fish, be flies.Girls, take beards.Sons, be your mothers.The future of the world now liesIn coral wombs behind our eyes.
— Clive Barker, Absolute Midnight
Angels have very nasty tempers. Especially when they’re feeling righteous.
— Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone
We cry for ourselves, don’t we? Not for the dead. The dead are past caring.
— Clive Barker
If you want to be a big success then it becomes a dick showing contest, and that’s not what it’s about. It can’t be about ‘My book sold more copies than your book.’ It can’t be about ‘More people went to see my movie than went to see your movie.’ If it is about that, then Danielle Steel must be an extraordinarily wonderful author because she sells so many copies. You can’t do calculations that way.What interests me is holding the vision: doing something that is yours and making sure that it can’t be like anyone else’s.
— Clive Barker
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.
— Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels
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
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, Abarat
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, The Thief of Always
Witch, do this for me, Find me a moonmade of longing.Then cut it sliver thin, and having cut it, hang it highabove my beloved’s house, so that she may look uptonightand see it, and seeing it, sigh for meas I sigh for her, moon or no moon.
— Clive Barker
Zombies are the ideal late twentieth-century monsters. A zombie is the one thing you can’t deal with. It survives anything. Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula could be sent down in so many ways. Zombies, though, fall outside all this. You can’t argue with them. They just keep coming at you.
— Clive Barker
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
Didn’t open the box? What was it last time? Didn’t know what it was? And yet we do keep finding each other, don’t we? – Cenobite
— Clive Barker
Why’d you want to sing about sad things?” Candy had asked him.”Because any fool can be happy, ” he’d said to her.”It takes a man with real heart”—he’d made a fist and laid it against his chest—”to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.
— Clive Barker, Days of Magic, Nights of War
Abaratians are very much about living in the moment; living life because that’s what we’ve got, we’ve got today, we’ve got now, we’ve got being alive now and we have to be awake and alive in the moment and not asleep in our lives. And they would find the idea of sleeping through your life, of being bored – they would think that was very stupid – why would you be bored when there’s so much to do and so much to see and so much to be?
— Clive Barker, Beneath The Surface of Clive Barker’s Abarat
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
The world had seen so many Ages: the Age of Enlightenment; of Reformation; of Reason. Now, at last, the Age of Desire. And after this, an end to Ages; an end, perhaps, to everything.
— Clive Barker, The Inhuman Condition
One of the things I’m trying to do over and over again in my books is create new mythologies, create new ways to understand the complexity of the world. I think what mythology does is impress upon chaotic experience the patterns, hierarchies and shapes which allow us to interpret the chaos and make fresh sense of it.
— Clive Barker
I don’t feel there’s any reason to apologise for having a wicked imagination. I think it’s important as a maker of fantasy and of horror.
— Clive Barker
Neil Gaiman is a star. He constructs stories like some demented cook might make a wedding cake, building layer upon layer, including all kinds of sweet and sour in the mix.
— Clive Barker
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