Top 300 Clive Barker Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “Does the beef salute the butcher as it throbs to it’s knees?”

— Clive Barker

154. “Minds weren’t pictures at an exhibition, all numbered, and hung in order of influence, one marked “Cunning,” the next, “Impressionable.” They were scrawls; they were sprawling splashes of graffiti, unpredictable, unconfinable.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

156. “Muck held the whip hand.”

— Clive Barker

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

163. “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

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

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

166. “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

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

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Clive Barker

172. “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

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

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Clive Barker

179. “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

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

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

183. “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

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

— Clive Barker

185. “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

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

— Clive Barker

187. “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

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

— Clive Barker

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “War is but a continuation of diplomacy by alternate means.”

— Clive Barker

195. “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

196. “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

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

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

199. “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

200. “Sometimes, of course, the war required that he be cruel, but what cause worth fighting for did not require cruelty of its champions once in a while?”

— Clive Barker