Top 300 Clive Barker Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “All Darkness was one darkness in the end. Of heart or Heavens, one Darkness.”

— Clive Barker

202. “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

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

— Clive Barker

204. “His body and his mind went about their different businesses. The former, freed from conscious instruction, breathed, rolled, sweated, and digested. The latter went dreaming.”

— Clive Barker

205. “My skull was a face that concealed scorpions.”

— Clive Barker

206. “Maybe the man had taken the wrong turning, but at least he’d travelled some extraordinary roads.”

— Clive Barker

207. “We’re living; but we impersonate the dead better than the dead themselves.”

— Clive Barker

208. “Indifference was the best remedy. Once you conceded defeat, life was a feather bed.”

— Clive Barker

209. “A sweet slip of a girl like you, why should you have to know anything about the sorrow of the world? You just believe me when I tell you... there’s no way to live your life to the full and not have a reason to shed a tear now and again. It’s not a bad feeling, child. That’s what a lament does. It makes you feel happy to be sad, in a strange way. D’you see?”

— Clive Barker

210. “The way she saw it, she was lucky. She wasn’t really blind – she just saw a different world from most other folks, and that put her in a unique position to do some good in the world.”

— Clive Barker

211. “Nothing, I had come to believe by the end, was more illusory than the idea of ending.”

— Clive Barker

212. “I don’t like to make a distinction between the writer and the painter, finally, because I do both things anyway. Everybody’s dreaming and trying to put down their dreams in the way that their hand knows best. I feel as much a unity, as much comradeship, with painters as I do writers .”

— Clive Barker

213. “Sometimes nature is even crueller than politics.”

— Clive Barker

214. “Stories had a way of doing that, in Grillo’s experience. It was his belief that nothing, but nothing, could stay secret, however powerful the forces with interests vested in silence. Conspirators might conspire and thugs attempt to gag but the truth, or an approximation of same, would show itself sooner or later, very often in the unlikeliest form. It was seldom hard facts that revealed the life behind the life. It was rumour, graffiti, strip cartoons and love songs.”

— Clive Barker

215. “No. No, I’m not.” Then she said: “I’m somebody else. I just don’t know who that somebody else is yet.” “Well that’s what journeys are for,” Diamanda Murkitt said.”

— Clive Barker

216. “It was that sleep itself – the act of closing the eyes and relinquishing control of her consciousness – was something she was temperamentally unsuited to.”

— Clive Barker

217. “Here was a place sacred to the dead, who were not the living ceased, but almost another species, requiring rites and prayers that belonged uniquely to them.”

— Clive Barker

218. “For a writer, and particularly a writer of my genre, which is the fantastical, I think that it’s to my advantage to feel remote from and disconnected from the world of deal making.”

— Clive Barker

219. “Whatever capacity she possesses to supernaturally beguile a human soul – and she possesses many – she liked his clear-sightedness too well, to blind him that way.”

— Clive Barker

220. “Or were they breed who had died from their half-life, caught in the sun, perhaps, or withered by longing?”

— Clive Barker

221. “He loved getting crucified at the summer and winter solstices,” Norma told Harry. Norma listened while the invisible presence added something to this. “He says you should try it, Harry. A crucifixion and a good blow job. Heaven on Earth.”

— Clive Barker

222. “Flesh is a trap, and magic sets us free.”

— Clive Barker

223. “This was the substance of every moment, she realized: the body – never certain if the next lungful would be its last – hovering for a tiny time between cessation and continuance. And in that space out of time, between a breath expelled and another drawn, the miraculous was easy, because neither flesh nor reason has laid their edicts there.”

— Clive Barker

224. “They knew a lot, the dead. How many times had she said to Harry they were the world’s greatest untapped resource? It was true. All they’d seen, all they’d suffered, all they’d triumphed over – lost to a world in need of wisdom. And why? Because at a certain point in the evolution of the species a profound superstition was sewn into the human heart that the dead were to be considered sources of terror rather than enlightenment.”

— Clive Barker

225. “When, finally, she did sleep, it was the slumber of a watcher and waiter. Light, and full of sighs.”

— Clive Barker

226. “Then, having finished with his gesture of remorse, he sat down, like any decent man who has been deeply wronged, and planned murder.”

— Clive Barker

227. “The seasons long for each other, like men and women, in order that they may be cured of their excesses.”

— Clive Barker

228. “You still love her, don’t you?” Pie said, once they were out and walking. “Of course I love her,” Estabrook said. “That’s why I want her dead.” “There’s no resurrection, Mr. Estabrook. Not for you, at least.” “It’s not me who’s dying,” he said. “I think it is,” came the.”

— Clive Barker

229. “Living and dying we feed the fire,” Steep said softly. “That is the melancholy truth of things.”

— Clive Barker

230. “Winning is beauty. It is like life itself.”

— Clive Barker

231. “Hate remembered though; hate remembered long after love had forgotten.”

— Clive Barker

232. “I thought I’d gone to the limits,′ Frank explains. ‘I hadn’t. The Cenobites gave me an experience beyond limits. Pain and pleasure, indivisible... Some things have to be endured. Take it from me. And that’s what makes the pleasures so sweet.”

— Clive Barker

233. “She’s got powers,” said de Bono, taking off his spectacles and surveying the terrain ahead. “Most women have, of course.”

— Clive Barker

234. “To every hour, its mystery. At dawn, the riddles of life and light. At noon, the conundrums of solidity. At three, in the hum and heat of the day, a phantom moon, already high. At dusk, memory. And at midnight? Oh, then the enigma of time itself; of a day that will never come again passing into history while we sleep.”

— Clive Barker

235. “I used to tell myself that,” he said. “Day in, day out. Used to try and dream the agonies away. But you can’t. Take it from me. You can’t. They have to be endured.”

— Clive Barker

236. “I’ll love you until the death of love.”

— Clive Barker

237. “Time would be precious from now on. It would tick by, of course, as it always had, but Harvey was determined he wouldn’t waste it with sighs and complaints. 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

238. “Sanity is a movable feast. One man’s madness is another’s politics.”

— Clive Barker

239. “He spent three months in a wash of depression and self-pity that bordered the suicidal. But even that solution was denied him by his new found nihilism. If nothing was worth living for it followed, didn’t it, that there was nothing worth dying for either.”

— Clive Barker

240. “But if it failed to show itself she would not grieve too deeply, for fear that the mending of broken hearts be a puzzle neither wit nor time had the skill to solve.”

— Clive Barker

241. “Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.”

— Clive Barker

242. “It was bad enough that these creatures had children and art; that they might also have vision was too dangerous a thought to entertain.”

— Clive Barker

243. “No hay mayor placer que el terror. Siempre y cuando sea el de otra persona.”

— Clive Barker

244. “Whatever you do, don’t look back.”

— Clive Barker

245. “But when I look out at it I think, well, it’s going to take us all one of these days, whoever we are: mad bastards, lovers, drunkards, it’s not going to pick and choose. We’ll all go to nothing sooner or later. And you know, maybe it’s my age, but that doesn’t worry me any longer. We all have our time, and when it’s over, it’s over.”

— Clive Barker

246. “Everybody is a book of blood; Wherever we’re opened, we’re red. The Book of Blood The dead have highways.”

— Clive Barker

247. “They knew a lot, the dead. How many times had she said to Harry they were the world’s greatest untapped resource? It was true. All they’d seen, all they’d suffered, all they’d triumphed over – lost to a world in need of wisdom.”

— Clive Barker

248. “Hayal edilen asla yitirilmez.”

— Clive Barker

249. “What are you trying to prove? Do you think if you kill enough people in the worst ways imaginable they’ll give you a name like the Madman, or the Butcher? It doesn’t matter how many abhorrent tortures you devise. You’ll always be the Pinhead.”

— Clive Barker

250. “I used to live in Los Angeles,” Norma said. “Off a winding road called Coldheart Canyon.”

— Clive Barker