Top 300 Clive Barker Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Hopelessness is reasonable. But nothing of worth in my life came of reason. Not my love, not my art, not my heaven. So I am hopeful.”

— Clive Barker

102. “I was a weird little kid. I was very irritable, bored, frustrated. I felt my imagination bubbling inside my head without having any way to express itself. Given a crayon and paper, I would not draw a train or a house. I would draw these monsters, beasts and demons.”

— Clive Barker

103. “Richard Christian Matheson is a master of compression. He knows how to catch a moment in words and convey it straight to the reader’s heart.”

— Clive Barker

104. “It’s all part of the dance, she thought; the dust, her hands, the light that was spiraling around her: it’s all part of the same wonderful dance. And I’m in it.”

— Clive Barker

105. “I don’t like PG-13 horror movies. I think they’re a contradiction in terms.”

— Clive Barker

106. “The dead have highways.” Clive Barker.”

— Clive Barker

107. “There is no delight the equal of dread. As long as it’s someone else’s.”

— Clive Barker

108. “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.”

— Clive Barker

109. “Didn’t open the box? What was it last time? Didn’t know what it was? And yet we do keep finding each other, don’t we? – Cenobite.”

— Clive Barker

110. “If you want to look like the people next door, you’re probably smothering yourself into your dreams.”

— Clive Barker

111. “Has anyone here ever heard of the Harrowing?” Dale asked, breaking the silence. No one replied. “It was in the time between Christ’s crucifixion and his Resurrection,” he went on. “The story goes, Christ went down into Hell, walked among the damned, and set many of them free. Then he returned to Earth and broke the bondage of death. It’s supposedly the first and only amnesty Hell has ever known.”

— Clive Barker

112. “No sword shall touch you. Unless it be mine.” – Anonymous, lover’s oath.”

— Clive Barker

113. “Meaning is always a latecomer. Beauty and music seduce us first; later ashamed of our own sensuality, we insist on meaning.”

— Clive Barker

114. “The monsters act out our rage. They act on their worst impulses, which is appealing to a certain part of us. They get punished for it, but we’ve enjoyed the spectacle of their liberation.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

116. “He’d fill every moment with the seasons he’d found in his heart: hopes like birds on a spring branch; happiness like a warm summer sun; magic like the rising mists of autumn. And best of all, love; love enough for a thousand Christmases.”

— Clive Barker

117. “My imagination is my polestar; I steer by that.”

— Clive Barker

118. “Yes, fantastic fiction can be intricately woven into the texture of our daily lives, addressing important issues in fabulist form. But it also serves to release us for a time from the definitions that confine our daily selves; to unplug us from a world that wounds and disappoints us, allowing us to venture into places of magic and transformation.”

— Clive Barker

119. “Leavening the flat bread of what we know, with the yeast of what we dream may come to pass.”

— Clive Barker

120. “This is the state of the beast,′ it said, ’to eat and be eaten.”

— Clive Barker

121. “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.”

— Clive Barker

122. “You’re right, of course. I haven’t come this far to deliver us into oblivion. I have such sights to show you. Soon, you will have answers to questions you have never even dared to ask.”

— Clive Barker

123. “Have patience; the lovers will suffer lovers always suffer.”

— Clive Barker

124. “We are all our own graveyards I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were.”

— Clive Barker

125. “Here are the stories written on the Book of Blood. They are a map of that dark highway that leads out of life towards unknown destinations. Few will have to take it, most will go on peacefully along lamplit streets, ushered out of living with prayers and caresses. But for a few, a chosen few, the horrors will come, skipping to fetch them off to the highway of the damned...”

— Clive Barker

126. “I’m not afraid,” he said. “What’s the use of fear? You can’t buy it or sell it, you can’t make love to it. You can’t even wear it if they strip off your shirt and you’re cold.”

— Clive Barker

127. “He spoke of both dancing and death with equal nonchalance, as though one carried as little significance as the other. It calmed her, hearing him talk that way.”

— Clive Barker

128. “However this miraculous place worked, it seemed real enough. The sun was hot, the soda was cold, the sky was blue, the grass was green. What more did he need to know?”

— Clive Barker

129. “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.”

— Clive Barker

130. “Her mother had always said that women, being more at peace with themselves than men, needed fewer distractions from their hurts.”

— Clive Barker

131. “What did I see? It’s no use telling you there are no words. Of course there are words; there are always words. The question is: can I wield them well enough to evoke the power of what I witnessed? That I doubt. But let me do my best.”

— Clive Barker

132. “What worth was a man who could not be haunted?”

— Clive Barker

133. “The un-people, the anti-tribe, humanity’s sack unpicked and sewn together again with the moon inside.”

— Clive Barker

134. “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.”

— Clive Barker

135. “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.”

— Clive Barker

136. “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.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

139. “Especially politics; that was the best trough to wallow in. You could get your snout, eyes, head and front hooves in that mess of muck and have a fine old time splashing around. It was an inexhaustible subject to devour, a swill with a little of everything in it, because everything, according to Judd, was political.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

141. “Living in Hell kept him aware of the possibility of Heaven, and he’d never felt more alive.”

— Clive Barker

142. “Give me B movies or give me death!”

— Clive Barker

143. “Of course. Remember, I’ve seen you in her. And it’s wonderful.”

— Clive Barker

144. “He wouldn’t be remembered well.”

— Clive Barker

145. “Her skin was flawless and always cool, always pale; her body was long, like her hair, like her fingers, like her laughter; and her eyes, oh, her eyes, had every season of leaf in them: the twin greens of spring and high summer, the golds of autumn, and, in her rages, black midwinter rot.”

— Clive Barker

146. “I will treat you with my knife the way you’ve treated my pages with your merciless eyes. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards.”

— Clive Barker

147. “Perhaps the House had heard Harvey wishing for a full moon, because when he and Wendell traipsed upstairs and looked out the landing window, there – hanging between the bare branches of the trees – was a moon as wide and as white as a dead man’s smile.”

— Clive Barker

148. “I’ve held a brain in my hands, which is an extraordinary experience.”

— Clive Barker

149. “She was so beautiful, you see. Not in any two-dimensional sense: she wasn’t young, she wasn’t innocent, she didn’t have that pristine symmetry so favored by ad-men and photographers. Her face was plainly that of a woman in her early forties: it had been used to laugh and cry, and usage leaves its marks. But she had a power to transform herself, in the subtlest way, making that face as various as the sky.”

— Clive Barker

150. “I’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 Barker