Clive Barker Quotes

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

Living in Hell kept him aware of the possibility of Heaven, and he’d never felt more alive.

~ Clive Barker

The dead have highways. Clive Barker

~ Clive Barker

The century's getting old and stale, it needs new tribes.

~ Clive Barker

You’ve always got me”“Always?”“Didn’t I just say so?”“Yes”“Am I liar? ““No.” I lied.

~ Clive Barker

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

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

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

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

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

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

Born from different parents, they were siblings in death, destroyed by the same hand.

~ Clive Barker

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

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

Angels have very nasty tempers. Especially when they’re feeling righteous.

~ 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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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