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

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

[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

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

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

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

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

Funny that. We live in islands of Hours and we never seem to have time enough for anything...

~ Clive Barker

Is there any good news?' Tesla

~ Clive Barker

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

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

~ Clive Barker

Sometimes nature is even crueller than politics.

~ Clive Barker

The pain, I can assure you, will be exquisite.

~ Clive Barker

I know many a strong man undone by marriage.

~ Clive Barker

I think that God that we have created and allowed to shape our culture through, essentially Christian theology is a pretty villainous creature. I think that one of the things that male patriarchal figure has done is, allowed under it's, his church, his wing, all kinds of corruptions and villainies to grow and fester. In the name of that God terrible wars have been waged, in the name of that God terrible sexism has been allowed to spread. There are children being born all across this world that don't have enough food to eat because that God, at least his church, tells the mothers and fathers that they must procreate at all costs, and to prevent procreation with a condom is in contravention with his laws. Now, I don't believe that God exists. I think that God is 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 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

The great grey beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.

~ Clive Barker

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

you must be careful with kindness. It's usually mistaken for weakness by stupid people.

~ Clive Barker

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

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

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

Wherever I go, I will speak of you with love.

~ Clive Barker

Meaning is always a latecomer. Beauty and music seduce us first; later ashamed of our own sensuality, we insist on meaning.

~ Clive Barker

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

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

All Darkness was one darkness in the end. Of heart or Heavens, one Darkness.

~ Clive Barker

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

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

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