Clive Barker Quotes

67 Sourced Quotes

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

Clive Barker
I've held a brain in my hands, which is an extraordinary experience.

Clive Barker
Are you coming? he said.
In a moment.
It's now or never.
Maybe it would be never, then. She was so transfixed by the formidable power being unleashed in front of her, she couldn't avert her astonished gaze. It fascinated her that strength of this magnitude should be turned to the sordid business of atrocity; something was wrong with a reality that made that possible, and offered no cure for it, nor hope of cure.

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

Clive Barker
Here is a list of fearful things:
The jaws of sharks, a vulture's wings,
The rabid bite of the dog's 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's no conscious thing on the face of the world that doesn't know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat.

Clive Barker
Believe nothing, Apolline advised. This woman wouldn't know the truth if it fucked her.

Clive Barker
And us? said the Hag. What happens to us then? Will we be free?
That's what we agreed.
We can go into extinction?
If that's what you want.
More than anything, said the Hag. More than anything.
There are worse things than existence, said Immacolata.
Oh? the Hag replied. Can you name one?
Immacolata thought for a short while.
No, she conceded, with a soft sigh of distress. You may be right, sister.

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
If we have nothing to do but service our own pleasure – because society has taught us that's all we're worth and we're exiled from positions of authority from which we could actually shape society – then we just become hedonists. Eventually, despite how great it may look on Saturday night, come Monday morning there's just purposelessness.

Clive Barker
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
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
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
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
She told him she made a rule of never marrying bankers. The next day he sent flowers, and a note saying that he'd relinquished his profession.

Clive Barker
His body and his mind went about their different businesses. The former, freed from conscious instruction, breathed, rolled, sweated, and digested. The latter went dreaming.

Clive Barker
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
Lilia sighed. Why me? she said, still shaking. Why should I have to tell it?
Because you're the best liar, Jerichau replied with a tight smile. You can make it true.

Clive Barker
Don't worry, he told her.
Me? she said. I never worry. It's all going to end badly whether I worry or not.

Clive Barker
Shadwell threw down his gun, and—though he had no taste for abattoirs—forced himself to survey the carnage before him. It was, he knew, the responsibility of one aspiring to godhood never to look away. Willful ignorance was the last refuge of humanity, and that was a condition he would soon have transcended.
And, when he studied the scene, it wasn't so unbearable. He could look at the tumble of corpses and see them for the empty sacks they were.

Clive Barker
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
Don't be sentimental, he chided. Memories aren't enough.
It was fruitless to argue the niceties of that: he was telling her that he was in pain; he didn't want platitudes or metaphysics.

Clive Barker
Perhaps there was a natural process at work here; a means by which the mind dealt with experiences that contradicted a lifetime's prejudices about the nature of reality. People simple forgot.

Clive Barker
Life is short,
and pleasures few,
and holed the ship,
and drowned the crew,
But O! But O!
How very blue
the sea is!

Clive Barker
What the enemy believed of you was probably true, or else why were you enemies in the first place?

Clive Barker
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
Your average game show host on TV, for instance, doesn't believe himself to be banal. He actually thinks that he's quite interesting. And if you look at the viewing figures, so do an enormous number of people in this country.

Clive Barker
One of the reasons why I don't get on with most fantasy writing - enchanted sword fantasy writing - is because I think it's emotionally untrue. People behave in very simple ways, unparadoxical ways. What I'm trying to do is bring into fantasy - as I hope I've been able to bring to horror - a certain kind of emotional realism. People have mentioned sex as being a major part of my fiction. An awful lot of horror fiction simply never contained that kind of material. Which seems to me to be extraordinary because most horror fiction is about the body in some way or other, and therefore it should be about sensuality and eroticism every bit as much as it's about corruption.

Clive Barker
Every body is a book of blood;
Wherever we're opened, we're red.

Clive Barker
There was such sanity in his voice; a politician's sanity, as he sold his flock the wisdom of the bomb. This soulless certainty was more chilling than hysteria or malice.

Clive Barker