Clive Barker Quotations | Page 2

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.

At best you can hold death at bay, you can pretend it isn't there; but to deny it totally is a sickness. And I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems, and, perversely perhaps, to enjoy a vicarious confrontation with them.

I've never worked where it was hard to be gay. Besides, being gay is a spectacular irrelevance to getting on with your life.

To you who have never died, may I say: Welcome to the world!

Behind 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.

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.

We burn so hard, but we shed so little light; it makes us crazy and sad.

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

To call you excrement would be an insult to the product of my bowels.

I dreamt a limitless book, A book unbound, Its leaves scattered in fantastic abundance On every line there was a new horizon drawn, New heavens supposed; New states, new souls.

There is no delight the equal of dread

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.

There’s no conscious thing on the face of the world that doesn’t know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat.

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.

No tears, please. It's a waste of good suffering.

Well, here he was. They could save each other, the way the poets promised lovers should. He was mystery, he was darkness, he was all she had dreamed of. And if she would only free him he would service her - oh yes - until her pleasure reached that threshold that, like all thresholds, was a place where the strong grew stronger, and the weak perished. Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa. And he knew it well enough to call it home.

Of 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.

There must still be room for the falling note, of course. Even in an undying world there are times when beauty passes from sight, or love passes from the heart, and we feel the sorrow of partition.

A man kills the thing he loves, and he must die a little himself.

She was a sea: and I had to swim in her.

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

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

In 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.

Believe me, when I say; There are no two powers That command the soul. One is God The other is the tide. -Anon From the novel Abarat

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

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...

Mischief nodded. 'It's true,' he conceded. 'You're in the company of eight world-class thieves,' he said, not without a little touch of pride. 'Saints we are not.' But then,' said Deaux-Deaux, 'who is?' he thought on this. 'Besides saints.

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

We have great cities to visit: New York and Washington, Paris and London; and further east, and older than any of these, the legendary city of Samarkand, whose crumbling palaces and mosques still welcome travelers on the Silk road. Weary of cities? Then we’ll take to the wilds. To the islands of Hawaii and the mountains of Japan, to forests where Civil War dead still lie, and stretches of sea no mariner ever crossed. They all have their poetry: the glittering cities and the ruined, the watery wastes and the dusty; I want to show you them all. I want to show you everything.

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.

All I ever wanted to do is darken the day and brighten the night

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!

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.

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

After all, where can the glorious, the goofy, and the god-like stand shoulder to shoulder?

‎"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.

Harvey wasn't interested in the clothes, it was the masks that mesmerized him. They were like snowflakes: no two alike. Some were made of wood and of plastic; some of straw and cloth and papier-mâché. Some were as bright as parrots, others as pale as parchment. Some were so grotesque he was certain they'd been carved by crazy people; others so perfect they looked like the death masks of angels. There were masks of clowns and foxes, masks like skulls decorated with real teeth, and one with carved flames instead of hair.

A 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!

You 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.

It was as though in these last minutes together--when they had so much to say--they could say nothing of the least significance, for fear it open the floodgates.

If you want to look like the people next door, you're probably smothering yourself into your dreams.

We are the star and the darkness it peirces

Have patience; the lovers will suffer lovers always suffer.

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

She wanted nothing that he could offer her, except perhaps his absence.

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

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!

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.

I 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.

..She had that brand of pragmatism that would find her the first brewing tea after Armageddon.

There 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.

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

Make your own worlds. Make your own laws. Make your own creations, your own star systems. Don't feel answerable to anyone, or as though you have to create after some preordained model. You don't have to write like myself, or King or Anne Rice: be yourself. Nothing is more wonderful than discovering a new voice, particularly if it happens to be your own.

…there’s nothing in the world more fun than doing something you’re good at.

Give me B movies or give me death!

Always, worlds within worlds.

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

Nothing else wounds so deeply and irreparably. Nothing else robs us of hope so much as being unloved by one we love

I 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

That which is imagined can never be lost.

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.

It’s only when you’ve lost someone that you realize the nonsense of that phrase “It’s a small world”. It isn’t. It’s a vast, devouring world, especially if you’re alone.

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.

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.

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

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

Evil, however powerful it seemed,could be undone by its own appetite

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.

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.

any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.

Study 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.

I've learned two things in my life. One that love is the beginning and end of all meaning. And two that it is the same thing whatever shape our souls have taken on this journey. Love is love. Is love.

You just have to trust your own madness.

Did I say that she was beautiful? I was wrong. Beauty is too tame a notion; it evokes only faces in magazines. A lovely eloquence, a calming symmetry; none of that describes this woman’s face. So perhaps I should assume I cannot do it justice with words. Suffice it to say that it would break your heart to see her; and it would mend what was broken in the same moment; and you would be twice what you’d been before.

She had opened a door... and now she was walking with demons. And at the end of her travels, she would have her revenge... Pain had made a sadist of her.

Memory, 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.

A monster lies in wait in me,a stew of wounds and misery.But fiercer still in life and limb,the me that lies in wait in him

We 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.

The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to 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.

I've never felt so good in my life,

It's irritating, because I would like to make movies that were as unrelenting and as explicit in their metaphysical, sexual and violent imagery as the stories. But with the way censorship is at present, there's no way you can do that.

I do love these events. It is a chance to interact in a direct and personal way. So when I do agree to attend such an event, I wholeheartedly throw myself headlong into it.