Top 300 Clive Barker Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Some die too soon. Most live too long.”

— Clive Barker

302. “She was indeed tired, as she’d claimed, but it wasn’t the cooking that exhausted her. It was the effort of suppressing her contempt for he damn fools who were gathered in the lounge below. She’d called them friends once, these half-wits, with their poor jokes and poorer pretensions.”

— Clive Barker

303. “You know, as a child I thought somebody came and took the world away in the night and then came back and unrolled it all again the following morning.”

— Clive Barker

304. “Lori had broken that spell of despair, coming to him not begging but demanding he forgive himself.”

— Clive Barker

305. “You won’t simply witness what is going to unfold in Hell from this point outward; you will make a testament of it, wherein my acts and my philosophies will be recounted in full detail. They will be my Gospels, and I will forbid you nothing in their chapters and verses, as long as it is observed truth, however far from my ideal of myself I may fall.”

— Clive Barker

306. “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

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

— Clive Barker

308. “Revulsion gave heat to his heals.”

— Clive Barker

309. “I feel things other people don’t. I don’t think it’s particularly clever of me, or anything like that. I just do it.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

311. “A skin was nothing. Pigs had skins; snakes had skins. They were knitted of dead cells, shed and grown and shed again. But a name? That was a spell, which summoned memories.”

— Clive Barker

312. “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

313. “Nobody’s allowed to come and mourn, you see. Out of sight, out of mind: that’s the idea. Of course, that’s not the way it works, is it? People forget prime ministers, but they remember murderers.”

— Clive Barker

314. “Besides, he guessed she wouldn’t have thanked him for delaying his purchase. She needed dope more than she needed him.”

— Clive Barker

315. “He was no longer innocent. With this slaughter he became the killer Decker had persuaded him he was. In murdering the prophet he made the prophecy true.”

— Clive Barker

316. “It was what his mother would have done in the circumstances. Boiled some fresh water, warmed the pot and counted out the spoonfuls of tea. Setting domestic order against the chaos, in the hope of winning some temporary reprieve from the vale of tears.”

— Clive Barker

317. “So many masks. Was she the only one who had no secret life, no other self in marrow or mind?”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

320. “Nobody ever just passed through; experience always left its mark.”

— Clive Barker

321. “His eyelids closed – buckled, really – the bones in his face so fragile they shattered under the weight of his very lids as he dropped to the threshold of existence. His last breath had already left him. And as he fell, life did the same.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

324. “Nor in prayer either. He had told Billy the truth, about his giving up God when his prayers for his father’s life had gone unanswered. Of such divine neglect was aetheism made; belief could not be rekindled now, however profound his terror.”

— Clive Barker

325. “Nothing would take him, he was a barbarian with the manners of a gentleman. Neither.”

— Clive Barker

326. “As Harry marveled, the Cenobite continued his brutal effort of making new adjustments to his own flesh so as to fit the Devil’s suit: first a slice off his other hip, down to the red meat; then up to his arms, slicing away the flesh at the back of his triceps; and passing the knife from left hand to right and back again, cutting effortlessly with either. The area around his feet looked like the floor of a butcher’s store. Cobs and slices of fatty meat were scattered everywhere.”

— Clive Barker

327. “There was a primitive power in naming someone. It gave you a handle on a person.”

— Clive Barker

328. “I was watching the power at work behind the face of the world. What I had always assumed to be a calamitous unseen war, waged in sky and rock and on occasion invading your human world, was not a bloody battle, with legions slaughtering one another; it was this endless fish-market bartering.”

— Clive Barker

329. “Why? What is his intention? Have you at least discovered that?” “The same as ours, we think,” Felixson said. “The getting and keeping of power. He hasn’t just taken our treaties, scrolls, and grimoires. He’s cleared out all the vestments, all the talismans, all the amulets – ” “Hush,” Ragowski said suddenly. “Listen.” There was a silence among them for a moment, and then a funereal bell chimed softly in the distance. “Oh Christ,” Lili said. “It’s his bell.” The dead man laughed. “He’s found you.”

— Clive Barker

330. “With Floyd we had three hundred and ninety-eight years between us. All that bitter experience,” he said, “and not one of us wise.”

— Clive Barker

331. “A feeling of intense loss overwhelmed him for a moment as he thought of his once-charmed life – of love, and magic, and friends, all of it, and all of them, dead.”

— Clive Barker

332. “Heaven will provide. Or else it won’t, and I’ll go hungry.”

— Clive Barker

333. “This, no doubt, was the call 33 had heard. Bored with his balanced diet of maize and maple peas, tired of the pecking order of the loft and the predictability of each day – the bird had wanted out; wanted up and away. A day of high life; of food that had to be chased a little, and tasted all the better for that; of the companionship of wild things. All this went through Cal’s head, in a vague sort of way, while he watched the circling flocks.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

335. “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

336. “Not a whisper of flatulence would dare this man’s bowels.”

— Clive Barker

337. “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

338. “Ricky tasted something he hadn’t experienced since childhood: the panic of losing the hand of a guardian. In this case the lost parent was his sanity. Somewhere.”

— Clive Barker

339. “But then sanity was a movable feast, wasn’t it? One man’s madness might be another’s politics.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

341. “Dreams are doorways... If we but have the courage to step over the threshold.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

343. “He’d never seen such a look on any human face: such a wilderness of innocent malice. A.”

— Clive Barker

344. “Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise.”

— Clive Barker

345. “Every man is his own Mephistopheles, don’t you think? If I hadn’t come along you’d have made a bargain with some other power. And you would have had your fortune, and your women, and your strawberries. All those torments I’ve made you suffer.”

— Clive Barker

346. “That’s a whole other story.’ ‘Is it?’ Gentle replied. ‘Or is it all one?”

— Clive Barker