Top 300 Clive Barker Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “We are the star and the darkness it peirces.”

— Clive Barker

153. “Muck held the whip hand.”

— Clive Barker

154. “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

155. “There were no chambers now along the passageway and consequently no lights. There was a glow up ahead, however – fitful and cold, but bright enough to illuminate both the ground she stumbled over, which was bare earth, and the silvery frost on the walls.”

— Clive Barker

156. “The World-Soul is sick, Harry, crazy-sick. And if we don’t each do our part and try to get to the root of its pain and burn it out, then everything is for nothing.”

— Clive Barker

157. “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.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

159. “Make a fist. Lightly. Leave enough room for a breath to pass through. Good. Good. All magic proceeds from breath. Remember that.”

— Clive Barker

160. “But I think humans are innately religious as a species, so you don’t need a specific excuse for examining the perversely unholy.”

— Clive Barker

161. “He liked the phrase “mother’s tit.” It said so much, so simply. Momma’s tit had a good deal more power to move these men than her apple pie.”

— Clive Barker

162. “Talk of Power and Might would always attract an audience. Lords never went out of fashion.”

— Clive Barker

163. “Who can call a man dead whose words still hush and whose sentiments move?”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

165. “I decided that I would do my best to be the worst thing Hell ever vomited forth.”

— Clive Barker

166. “The carcass closest to him was the remains of the pimply youth he’d seen in Car One. The body hung upside-down, swinging back and forth to the rhythm of the train, in unison with its three fellows; an obscene danse macabre. Its arms dangled loosely from the shoulder joints, into which gashes an inch or two deep had been made, so the bodies would hang more neatly.”

— Clive Barker

167. “And with that comprehension, so unlike the simplifications she’d been ruled by hitherto, she became even more certain that the carpet they carried was a last hope, while he – whose home the Weave contained – seemed increasingly indifferent to its fate, living in the moment and for the moment, touched scarcely at all by hope or regret.”

— Clive Barker

168. “Fear gripped Harry, like some old dope-pusher promising a terrible high.”

— Clive Barker

169. “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...”

— Clive Barker

170. “I never want to be the producer that I too often got.”

— Clive Barker

171. “What I tried to do is deliver movies that have worked for me more than once.”

— Clive Barker

172. “Lost in the wasteland, Ashbery was found by a light flickering up from between the fractured paving stones. Its beams were bitterly cold, and sticky in a way light had no right to be, adhering to his sleeve and hand before fading away. Intrigued, he tracked its source from one eruption to another, each point brighter than the one before.”

— Clive Barker

173. “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.”

— Clive Barker

174. “If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke – Aye, and what then? – S. T. Coleridge, Anima Poetae.”

— Clive Barker

175. “Suzanna had argued with zealots before – her brother had been born again at twenty-three, and given his life to Christ – she knew from experience there was no gainsaying the bigotry of faith.”

— Clive Barker

176. “Putting down the devil was the Lord’s own sport.”

— Clive Barker

177. “The wind was not invisible. It had a texture, as though it carried a weight of dust, the motes steadily gumming up her eyes and sealing her nose, finding its way into her underwear and up into her body by those routes too.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

179. “I don’t take accusations of selling out lightly.”

— Clive Barker

180. “You’re damned if you can’t forgive, Jude.”

— Clive Barker

181. “The flawlessly beautiful were flawlessly happy, weren’t they?”

— Clive Barker

182. “The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I’ve also stood in front of those same paintings with people who’ve said, ‘let’s get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.’ I have lingered, of course.”

— Clive Barker

183. “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.”

— Clive Barker

184. “I am not your Father. I am but a child, like you. Afraid, like you. Fearing sometimes, as you fear.”

— Clive Barker

185. “Its face crinkled up grotesquely, the eyes narrowing like those of a laughing Buddha, the lips peeling back to expose a sickle of brilliant teeth.”

— Clive Barker

186. “They’re not in the gutter because they had visions, Gentle,” Clem said. “They’re there because they’ve been abused, or they’ve abused themselves.” “Which means they can’t cover their despair the way the rest can. They’ve got no distractions from their pain. So they get drunk and crazy, and the next day they’re even more lost than they were the day before. But I’d still rather trust them than all the bishops and the ministers. Maybe they’re naked, but isn’t that a holy state?”

— Clive Barker

187. “Only once did Lori glimpse such an entity, supine on a mattress in the corner of its boudoir. It was naked, corpulent and sexless, its sagging body a motley of dark, oily skin and larval eruptions that seeped phosphorescence, soaking its simple bed.”

— Clive Barker

188. “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.”

— Clive Barker

189. “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.”

— Clive Barker

190. “Not a classic reunion. The lover, on seeing his beloved, throws up down his shirt. But then, nothing that happened between Jacqueline and myself was ever quite normal.”

— Clive Barker

191. “The Monastery of the Cenobitical Order was a large-walled compound built seven hundred thousand years ago on a damned-made hill of stone and cement.”

— Clive Barker

192. “Among his memories of the whole and the human, sharpest was that of Decker.”

— Clive Barker

193. “Be strong, little mother,” she said to Melissa. “I know you can be.” “Yes?” Melissa said a little doubtfully.”

— Clive Barker

194. “Men’s supply of passion, she knew from long experience, was easily depleted. Though they might threaten to move earth and heaven too, half an hour later their boasts would be damp sheets and resentment.”

— Clive Barker

195. “Hell was easy; romance was hard.”

— Clive Barker

196. “Do you understand?” the figure beside the first speaker demanded. Its voice, unlike that of its companion, was light and breathy – the voice of an excited girl. Every inch of its head had been tattooed with an intricate grid, and at every intersection of horizontal and vertical axes a jeweled pin driven through to the bone. Its tongue was similarly decorated. “Do you even know who we are?” it asked.”

— Clive Barker

197. “Remember, Lucius, that everything you learn is already a part of you, even to the Godhead Itself. Study nothing except in the knowledge that you already knew it. Worship nothing except in adoration of your true self. And fear nothing” – there the Maestro stopped and shuddered, as though he had a presentiment – “fear nothing except in the certainty that you are your enemy’s begetter and its only hope of healing. For everything that does evil is in pain. Will you remember those things?”

— Clive Barker

198. “What I do know is that I have never found clowns remotely funny. I am not alone in this, I think. More people find clowns disturbing or distressing rather than raucously amusing. Is it that the nature of human existence has changed so radically in the last century or so that what was funny to our grandparents and great-grandparents is now tragic or terrifying?”

— Clive Barker

199. “Logic is the last refuge of a coward.”

— Clive Barker

200. “Kaufman calculated the risks of his situation: the mathematics of panic.”

— Clive Barker