Top 300 Clive Barker Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I don’t plot or outline, though I may take a few notes here and there, instead I let my dream world fill up each night with a segment of the story. I do this without worrying about it, or trying to force it, and when I wake up the dream bag is full, and I can go to my writing desk, and dream all over the page.”

— Clive Barker

52. “One man’s pornography is another man’s theology.”

— Clive Barker

53. “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

54. “Never believe your eyes.”

— Clive Barker

55. “Mutilation is the badge that can never be taken off, and sets us apart from all others. Pain is important to the bonding-a physical horror that bonds us ever tighter to all those who have partaken. The intensity of the experience helps to widen the gulf between us and those who have not shared.”

— Clive Barker

56. “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!”

— Clive Barker

57. “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.”

— Clive Barker

58. “The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive. Here he was, buried in the belly of that smothering month, wondering if he would ever find his way out through the cold coils that lay between here and Easter.”

— Clive Barker

59. “There was no harm done; and what would a Resurrection be without a few laughs?”

— Clive Barker

60. “Hell is reimagined by each generation. Its terrain is surveyed for absurdities and remade in a fresher mold; its terrors are scrutinized and, if necessary, reinvented to suit the current climate of atrocity; its architecture is redesigned to appall the eye of the modern damned.”

— Clive Barker

61. “I really believe that there is an enormous appetite amongst readers for an originality of vision. In other words, be true to your own dreams and there will always be people who want to hear them.”

— Clive Barker

62. “The extraordinary’s the norm.”

— Clive Barker

63. “You’ll learn, honey. Love can be the best thing in life. And it can be the worst. The absolute worst.”

— Clive Barker

64. “Where else can bubble-gum hearts, the dream travellers, the serial killers, and the occasional guest-star from beyond the grave occupy the same space?”

— Clive Barker

65. “Everywhere, in the wreckage around him, he found evidence to support the same bitter thesis: that he had encountered nothing in his life – no person, no state of mind or body – he wanted sufficiently to suffer even passing discomfort for.”

— Clive Barker

66. “Often people who are wonderful with animals aren’t always terribly good with human beings.”

— Clive Barker

67. “I love meeting people who’ve read my books. The prime reason to be on the planet is to make things I can show to other people: paintings, books, movies.”

— Clive Barker

68. “Love makes its demands, and you listen. You can’t bargain with it. You can’t fight it. Not if it’s really love.”

— Clive Barker

69. “Sometimes you need to let things strike your heart and not your head.”

— Clive Barker

70. “I’ve dealt with a lot of producers who were pricks and I’m determined not to be that.”

— Clive Barker

71. “You opened their eyes to another world, darling. They’ll never forgive you for that.”

— Clive Barker

72. “We’re making strange fictions of strange things inside ourselves.”

— Clive Barker

73. “She had long ago accepted that life was unfair. But why, when she’d accepted the bitter truth, did circumstance insist on rubbing her face in it?”

— Clive Barker

74. “All is death, woman. All is pain. Love breeds loss. Isolation breeds resentment. No matter which way we turn, we are beaten. Our only true inheritance is death. And our only legacy, dust.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

76. “We’re both thieves, Harvey Swick. I take time. You take lives. But in the end we’re the same: both Thieves of Always.”

— Clive Barker

77. “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!”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

79. “Always, worlds within worlds.”

— Clive Barker

80. “Women had always existed: they had lived, a species to themselves, with the demons. But they had wanted playmates: and together they had made men. What an error, what a cataclysmic miscalculation.”

— Clive Barker

81. “Anyway, it’s gone. And there’s nothing left in my pocket to charm you. So from now on it’s going to have to be tears or nothing I’m afraid. That’s all I’ve got left to tell you see: tears, tears, tears.”

— Clive Barker

82. “We 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 Barker

83. “Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself. So August gave way to September and there were few complaints.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

85. “Darkness 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 Barker

86. “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.”

— Clive Barker

87. “Midian is where the monsters go.”

— Clive Barker

88. “There are lives lived for love, and lives lived for art. We, happy band, have chosen the later persuasion.”

— Clive Barker

89. “Perhaps 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 Barker

90. “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

91. “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

92. “What do the good know?’ he said. ‘Except what the bad teach them by their excesses?”

— Clive Barker

93. “So intent was Frank upon solving the puzzle of Lemarchand’s box that he didn’t hear the great bell begin to ring.”

— Clive Barker

94. “It’s always what may not be shown that shows the most. Forbidden words are always the most eloquent.”

— Clive Barker

95. “Nothing happens carelessly. We’re not brought into the world without reason, even though we may never understand the reason. An infant that lives an hour, that dies before it can lay eyes on those who made it, even that soul did not live without purpose: this is my sudden certainty.”

— Clive Barker

96. “The sun rose like a stripper, keeping its glory well covered by cloud till it seemed there’d be no show at all.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

98. “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.”

— Clive Barker

99. “So let it do its worst, if that at the last was inevitable. Let the void come, and bring an end to the tyranny of hope.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker