Top 300 Clive Barker Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Dead isn’t bad,” Narcisse said. “It isn’t even that different.”

— Clive Barker

252. “What time didn’t steal from under your nose, circumstance did. It was useless to hope otherwise. Useless to dream that the world somehow meant you good.”

— Clive Barker

253. “Sounds to me like those nails are touching too much gray matter.”

— Clive Barker

254. “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

255. “She’d taken the harlot century she’d been born into for granted, knowing no other, but now-seeing it with his eyes, hearing it with his ears-she understood it afresh; saw just how desperate it was to please, yet how dispossessed of pleasure; how crude, even as it claimed sophistication; and, despite it’s zeal to spellbind, how utterly unenchanting.”

— Clive Barker

256. “Like a prisoner without hope of parole she took what entertainment she could find to ease the passage of time.”

— Clive Barker

257. “Brooding only looks good in the movies.”

— Clive Barker

258. “The stench of disinfectant could not entirely mask the odor of human pain.”

— Clive Barker

259. “Magic is the first and last religion of the world. It has the power to make us whole.”

— Clive Barker

260. “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

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

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

263. “They looked, to all intents and purposes, like living men and women. But then wasn’t that the trick of their craft? To imitate life so well the illusion was indistinguishable from the real thing?”

— Clive Barker

264. “Maybe if they didn’t tell you the stories... they’d actually go out and do it.”

— Clive Barker

265. “Who in their right minds would trust someone who made a profession out of poking around in sick people?”

— Clive Barker

266. “Why do boys always love talking about ghosts and murders and hangings?’ ‘Because it’s exciting,’ Wendell said.”

— Clive Barker

267. “He had certainly set his eyes on more voluptuous creatures, but something about her lack of glamour engaged him. Such women were in his experience often more entertaining company than beauties like Julia. They could be flattered or bullied into acts the beauties would never countenance and be grateful for the attention.”

— Clive Barker

268. “But better to be buried in the rubble than succumb to the Mask. And be flattered, at the end, that Fate had at least offered her a choice of extinctions.”

— Clive Barker

269. “Houses weren’t haunted, only human minds.”

— Clive Barker

270. “Nothing is fixed. In and out the shuttle goes fact and fiction, mind and matter, woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that hidden amongst them is a filigree which will with time become a world.”

— Clive Barker

271. “The Deluge wasn’t a wave, was it? It was blind men with axes; it was the great on their knees begging not to die at the hands of idiots; it was the itch of the irrational grown to an epidemic.”

— Clive Barker

272. “Once you conceded defeat, life was a feather bed. In.”

— Clive Barker

273. “We cannot believe, we men, that power will ever reside happily in the body of a woman, unless that power is a male child. Not true power. The power must be in male hands, God-given. That’s what our fathers tell us, idiots that they are.”

— Clive Barker

274. “If you were alone on earth, what would you know? What the mirror told you, that’s all. The rest would be myth and conjecture.”

— Clive Barker

275. “The Hell Priest had begun to utter what sounded like a cross between a chant and an equation: numbers and words intertwined.”

— Clive Barker

276. “Extinct,” Steep murmured. “Yes.” He smiled. “Extinct, extinct, extinct.” It was like a mantra:.”

— Clive Barker

277. “He was mystery, he was darkness, he was all she had dreamed of. And if she would only free him he would service her -oh yes- until her pleasure reached that thereshold that, like all theresholds, was a place where the strong grew stronger, and the weak perished.”

— Clive Barker

278. “Imagination was true power: it worked transformations wealth and influence never could.”

— Clive Barker

279. “Do unto others, boy, before they do unto you.”

— Clive Barker

280. “Hayal edilen asla yitirilmez.”

— Clive Barker

281. “No passion, only sudden lust, and just as sudden indifference.”

— Clive Barker

282. “If nothing was worth living for it followed, didn’t it, that there was nothing worth dying for either.”

— Clive Barker

283. “You leave marks on people, Gentle. That’s a responsibility you can’t just shrug off.”

— Clive Barker

284. “This will not come again. Nor this. Nor this...”

— Clive Barker

285. “Forgive yourself,’ Boone said. ‘I did.”

— Clive Barker

286. “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

287. “I don’t remember nineteen,” Will said. “Or twenty, come to that. I have a very vague recollection of twenty-one – ” He laughed. “But you get to a place when you’re so high you’re not high anymore.”

— Clive Barker

288. “The presence of phantoms – everywhere – their faces, ripe with need and unspent passion, trailing their hunger like pollen from flowers that were past their hour but refused to wither and disappear.”

— Clive Barker

289. “Sure, work could be a pain in the ass, but it was purpose, and what was a life, any life, his life, without purpose?”

— Clive Barker

290. “Some die too soon. Most live too long.”

— Clive Barker

291. “Having a routine that bordered on stagnancy had its benefits.”

— Clive Barker

292. “Somebody’s voice rose in prayer, another simply sobbed. What grief was this? Not his passing, surely. He was too minor to earn such lamentation.”

— Clive Barker

293. “But the strongest scent was also the oldest – it was the perfume of his transgressions. There were other smells, too, some of which she could name – incense, books, sweat – and far, far more that she had no name for.”

— Clive Barker

294. “He looked too drained to argue, his stare somehow unfinished, as though it had a place it wanted to rest but couldn’t find.”

— Clive Barker

295. “Experience was made up of endless ambiguities – of motive, of feeling, of cause and effect – and if he was to win under such circumstances, he had to understand how those ambiguities worked.”

— Clive Barker

296. “She got up and crossed to the window. Like father like daughter, he thought: window freaks, both of them.”

— Clive Barker

297. “It’d just be another opinion,” Maxine said, poking at the fire with the stick she’d picked up. “People would go on believing their favorite versions.” “You think?” “For sure. You can’t change people’s opinion about stuff like that. It’s embedded. They believe what they believe.”

— Clive Barker

298. “Revulsion gave heat to his heals.”

— Clive Barker

299. “He took a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped hard at his mouth, back and forth, as though a residue of guilt clung there and he was afraid it would give him away.”

— Clive Barker

300. “He told me he loved me, Clem.’ Oh Lord.’ ‘And I believed him.’ ‘How many dozens of men have told you that?’ ‘Yes, but he was different ‘Famous last words.”

— Clive Barker