Clive Barker Quotes

You can plan to be brave - it's even better if you just try to be brave.

Sung to the tune of O Christmas Tree O woe is me, O woe is me, I used to have a hamster tree, But it was eaten by a newt, And now I have no cuddly fruit, O woe is me, O woe is me, I used to have a hamster tree!

I don't like to make a distinction between the writer and the painter , finally , because I do both things anyway . Everybody's dreaming and trying to put down their dreams in the way that their hand knows best . I feel as much a unity , as much comradeship , with painters as I do writers .

One man's pornography is another man's theology.

We always think we are right, and - search as I have - there is no evil under the sun that somebody somewhere won't argue is actually a good, no idiocy that hasn't got its perfectly serious defenders, and no tyrant, past or present - no matter how bloody - without some bunch of zealot schmucks to defend him or his reputation till the last breath in their bodies - or preferably somebody else's.

I know that I want to bring sex and horror together as I have been able to in my books.

To dream in isolation can be properly splendid to be sure; but to dream in company seems to me infinitely preferable.

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.

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.

True joy is a profound remembering; and true grief the same.

Whatever capacity she possesses to supernaturally beguile a human soul—and she possesses many—she liked his clear-sightedness too well, to blind him that way.

My feet are killing me." "I knew somebody who had feet like that. They'd walk all over him. Archie Kashanian was his name. He used to wake up with footprints all over his chest, all over his face. It was the death of him, finally.

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

Words are sexier than flesh.

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.

And in time it will be as though men had never come to this perfect corner of the world-never called it paradise on earth, never despoiled it with their dream factories; and in the golden hush of the afternoon all that will be heard will be the flittering of dragonflies, and the murmur of hummingbirds as they pass from bower to bower, looking for a place to sup sweetness.

being with people makes me vomit. I don't like em. I never did.

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.

Here is a list of terrible things, The jaws of sharks, a vultures wings The 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.

Three is the number of those who do holy work; Two is the number of those who do lover's work; One is the number of those who do perfect evil Or perfect good.

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.

..which should teach you something about this world. That it's a place where whatever you work for and care about is bound to be taken away from you sooner or later, and there isn't a thing you can do about it.

Well, it was most likely too late; there would not be time for me to flagellate myself for every dishonorable deed in that list, nor any chance to make good the harms I’d done. Minor harms, to be sure, in the scheme of things; but large enough to regret.

As for theatre, there's ups and downs to everything. Theatre is ephemeral. But that is part of its charm because you can always say the production was better than it was.

I can see in your eyes that there’s no seam of untapped joy left in you. The best of life has come and gone. Those days when sudden epiphanies swept over you, and you had visions of the rightness of all things and of your place amongst them; they’re history. You’re in a darker place now.

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.

That which is imagined can never be lost.

Superman is, after all, an alien life form. He is simply the acceptable face of invading realities.

For a writer, and particularly a writer of my genre, which is the fantastical, I think that it's to my advantage to feel remote from and disconnected from the world of deal making.

You have to taste the sour urine before you break the jug.

Have patience; the lovers will suffer lovers always suffer.

Give me B movies or give me death!

The great grey beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.

Your flesh is killing your spirit. You have forsaken yourself.

The whole point about vision is that it's very individual, it's very personal, and it has to be confessional. It has to be something which hurts - the pulling out of it and putting it on the page hurts. Art can be about the individual writer's response to his or her condition, and if that response comes out of a predigested belief about what the audience wants to hear about the writer's condition, then it has no truth, it has no validity. You either write with your own blood or nobody's. Otherwise it's just ink.

I'm a poet,' the young man said, 'And it's my job to remember the sadness of things.

Midian is where the monsters go.

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.

Fear is a place where you just tell the truth

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.

Sooner or later even the most ambitious glutton must crawl away and seek the solace of the vomitorium.

All things are true. God's an Astronaut. Oz is Over the Rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters live." - Peloquin

There is no delight the equal of dread

Writing about the unholy is one way of writing about what is sacred.

Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any story springs. The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator's voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.

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.

Witch, do this for me, Find me a moon made of longing. Then cut it sliver thin, and having cut it, hang it high above my beloved's house, so that she may look up tonight and see it, and seeing it, sigh for me as I sigh for her, moon or no moon.

My father used to say: Every bird is one bird, and every book is one book, and every bird and every book is one thing too, under the words and the feathers." He finished with a flourish, as though the meaning of this was self-evident.