Top 300 Clive Barker Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You must be careful with kindness. It’s usually mistaken for weakness by stupid people.”

— Clive Barker

2. “Welcome to the worst nightmare of all, reality!”

— Clive Barker

3. “Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we’re opened, we’re red.”

— Clive Barker

Featured in: Reading Quotes

4. “That which is imagined can never be lost.”

— Clive Barker

5. “No tears, please. It’s a waste of good suffering.”

— Clive Barker

6. “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

7. “All I ever wanted to do is darken the day and brighten the night.”

— Clive Barker

8. “Your flesh is killing your spirit. You have forsaken yourself.”

— Clive Barker

9. “I 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 Barker

10. “I firmly believe that a story is only as good as the villain.”

— Clive Barker

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

11. “My life is in the art that I make, and I’m very happy with it.”

— Clive Barker

12. “Words are sexier than flesh.”

— Clive Barker

13. “I am inevitable.”

— Clive Barker

14. “Fear is a place where you just tell the truth.”

— Clive Barker

15. “Flesh could not keep its glamour, nor eyes their sheen. They would go to nothing soon. But monsters are forever.”

— Clive Barker

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

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

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

21. “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.”

— Clive Barker

22. “O 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 Barker

23. “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.”

— Clive Barker

24. “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.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

26. “All things are true. God’s an Astronaut. Oz is Over the Rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters live.” – Peloquin.”

— Clive Barker

27. “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.”

— Clive Barker

28. “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.”

— Clive Barker

29. “Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa. And he knew it well enough to call it home.”

— Clive Barker

30. “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.”

— Clive Barker

31. “I have such sights to show you. Soon, you will have answers to questions you have never even dared to ask.”

— Clive Barker

32. “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!”

— Clive Barker

33. “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.”

— Clive Barker

34. “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.”

— Clive Barker

35. “There was pain without hope of healing. There was life that refused to end, long after the mind had begged the body to cease. And worst, there were dreams come true.”

— Clive Barker

36. “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 Barker

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Clive Barker

38. “They will say your doubts shed innocent blood. But I say – what’s blood for, if not for shedding?”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

41. “I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems of death.”

— Clive Barker

42. “Books should make somebody look at how they feel, be honest with themselves.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

44. “Wherever I go, I will speak of you with love.”

— Clive Barker

45. “The great grey beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.”

— Clive Barker

46. “I was born alive. Isn’t that punishment enough?”

— Clive Barker

47. “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

48. “There is no delight the equal of dread.”

— Clive Barker

49. “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.”

— Clive Barker

50. “The pain, I can assure you, will be exquisite.”

— Clive Barker