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 BarkerBehind 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 BarkerOf all the rash and midnight promises made in the name of love, none, Boone now knew, was more certain to be broken than "I'll never leave you.
Clive BarkerWe 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 BarkerThere 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 BarkerPerhaps 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 BarkerI 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 BarkerA soul of water a soul of stone. A soul by name a soul unknown. The hours unmake our flesh our bone. The Soul is all and all alone!
Clive BarkerI haven't even had a life I could call my own, and you're ready to slot me into the grand design. Well, I don't think I want to go. I want to be my own design.
Clive BarkerO 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 BarkerNothing else wounds so deeply and irreparably. Nothing else robs us of hope so much as being unloved by one we love
Clive BarkerYou are my beauty, my body, perfected. All I was drained off into you. When you left, my health went with you - leaving a moral morbidity I smell in my sleep. The acts I committed for the love of you. Acts I can never forget. I crawled into the bellies of the dead to fish out a little life... I have an appetite for it now. I have an unrelenting lust for death.
Clive BarkerI'm a great dog fanatic. My own dog died a little while ago and I take it very personally when things die-it's a major offence.
Clive BarkerI 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 BarkerMemory, 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 BarkerIf you want to look like the people next door, you're probably smothering yourself into your dreams.
Clive BarkerThere are lives lived for love, and lives lived for art. We, happy band, have chosen the later persuasion.
Clive BarkerWe each die countless little deaths on our way to the last. We die out of shame as humiliation. We perish from despair. And, of course, we die for love.
Clive BarkerHis 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 BarkerI 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 Barkerany fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.
Clive BarkerBut I think humans are innately religious as a species, so you don't need a specific excuse for examining the perversely unholy.
Clive BarkerLeavening the flat bread of what we know, with the yeast of what we dream may come to pass.
Clive BarkerThere’s no conscious thing on the face of the world that doesn’t know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat.
Clive BarkerOf course it’s the apparently tranquil periods that deceive us. Though our instruments or our senses or our wits may not be able to see the processes that are leading toward these clusters of events, they’re happening. The star, the wheel, the butterfly—all are in a subtle state of unrest, waiting for the moment when some invisible mechanism signals that the time has come. Then the star explodes; the wheel makes poor men rich; the butterfly mates and dies.
Clive BarkerDarkness 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 BarkerStudy nothing except in the knowledge that you already knew it. Worship nothing except in adoration of your true self. And fear nothing except in the certainty that you are your enemy's begetter and its only hope of healing.
Clive BarkerThe sun rose like a stripper, keeping its glory well covered by cloud till it seemed there'd be no show at all.
Clive BarkerYou must be careful with kindness. It's usually mistaken for weakness by stupid people.
Clive BarkerWe're both thieves, Harvey Swick. I take time. You take lives. But in the end we're the same: both Thieves of Always.
Clive BarkerIn this sense love is of a different order to any other phenomenon, for it may be both an event and a sign of that invisible mechanism I spoke of before; perhaps the finest sign, the most certain. In it’s throes we need neither luck nor science. We are the wheel, and the man who profits by it. We are the star, and the darkness it pierces. We are the butterfly, brief and beautiful.
Clive Barker"Magic is the first and last religion of the world. It has the power to make us whole, to open our eyes to the Dominions and return us to ourselves. Everything that isn't us is also ourselves. We're joined to everything that was, is and will be. From one end of the Imajica to another. From the tiniest mote dancing over this flame to the Godhead Itself.
Clive Barker