Clive Barker Quotes

“Nothing else wounds so deeply and irreparably. Nothing else robs us of hope so much as being unloved by one we love”
― Clive Barker

“Superman is, after all, an alien life form. He is simply the acceptable face of invading realities.”
― Clive Barker

“Funny that. We live in islands of Hours and we never seem to have time enough for anything...”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Absolute Midnight

“The moon had risen behind him, the color of a shark's underbelly. It lit the ruined walls, and the skin of his arms and hands, with its sickly light, making him long for a mirror in which to study his face. Surely he'd be able to see the bones beneath the meat; the skull gleaming the way his teeth gleamed when he smiled. After all, wasn't that what a smile said? Hello, world, this is the way I'll look when the wet parts are rotted.”
― Clive Barker, The Great and Secret Show

“Kaufman almost smiled at the perfection of its horror. He felt an offer of insanity tickling the base of his skull, tempting him into oblivion, promising a blank indifference to the world.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume One

“The flawlessly beautiful were flawlessy happy, weren't they? To Kristy this had always seemed self-evident. Tonight, however, the alcohol made her wonder if envy hadn't blinded her. Perhaps to be flawless was another kind of sadness.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Her gaze went with her, into a room with walls of frozen earth, and a floor the same, the latter split from corner to corner, and a fissure opened in it from which a flame column rose four or five times the size of a man. There was bitter cold off it rather than heat, and no reassuring flicker in its heart. Instead its innards churned upon themselves, turning over and over some freight of stuff which she failed to recognize at first, but her appalled stare rapidly interpreted. There was a body in the fire, hacked limb from limb, human enough that she recognized it as flesh, but no more than that. Baphomet's doing presumably, some torment visited on a transgressor. Boone said the Baptizer's name even now, and she readied herself for sight of its face. She had it too, but from inside the flame, as the creature there--not dead, but alive, not Midian's subject, but its creator--rolled its head over in the turmoil of flame and looked her way. This was Baphomet. This diced and divided thing. Seeing its face, she screamed. No story or movie screen, no desolation, no bliss, had prepared her for the maker of Midian. Sacred it must be, as anything so extreme must be sacred. A thing beyond things. Beyond love or hatred or their sum, beyond the beautiful or the monstrous or their sum. Beyond, finally, her mind's power to comprehend or catalog.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“I don't like PG-13 horror movies. I think they're a contradiction in terms.”
― Clive Barker

“The places where death comes to take love away, where we lose each other and lose ourselves; that's where the connections begin. It takes a brave soul to look there and not despair."

"I've tried to be brave," she said.

"I know," he said softly. "I know.”
― Clive Barker, Everville

“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, The Hellbound Heart

“I found a brief piece of by Antonio Vivaldi around this time which became my ‘Pinhead Mood Music’. Called Al Santo Sepolcro (At The Holy Sepulchre), it opens more like a piece of modern orchestral music, and although it it moves toward Vivaldi’s familiar harmonies, there is always the threat that it will fall back into dissonance. The piece progresses in an exquisite agony, poised on a knife edge between beauty and disfigurement, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. Perfect.”
― Doug Bradley, Behind the Mask of the Horror Actor

“ I didn't read the book. I burned it after the first sentence. ”
― Rodindeadpan

“That's half of your trouble," muttered the crocodile. "You believe everything's true."

"That's because everything is," replied Mr. Bacchus.”
― Clive Barker

“There is no delight the equal of dread. As long as it's someone else's.”
― Clive Barker, Dread [Graphic Novel]

“Here are the stories written on the Book of Blood. They are a map of that dark highway that leads out of life towards unknown destinations. Few will have to take it, most will go on peacefully along lamplit streets, ushered out of living with prayers and caresses. But for a few, a chosen few, the horrors will come, skipping to fetch them off to the highway of the damned...”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volumes Four to Six

“Logic is the last refuge of a coward.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume One

“The dead have highways." Clive Barker”
― Clive Barker

“And Quaid knew, meeting the clown's vacant stare through an air turned bloody, that
there was worse in the world than dread. Worse than death itself.
There was pain without hope of healing. There was life that refused to end, long after the
mind had begged the body to cease. And worst, there were dreams come true.”
― Clive Barker, Dread [Graphic Novel]

“We’re making strange fictions of strange things inside ourselves.”
― Clive Barker

“Decker pulled the mask on. It smelt of his excitement. As soon as he breathed in he got a hard. Not the little sex-hard, but the death-hard; the murder-hard. It sniffed the air for him, even through the thickness of his trousers and underwear. It smelt the victim that ran ahead of him. The Mask didn't care that his prey was female; he got the murder-hard for anyone. In his time he'd had a heat for old men, pissing their pants as they went down in front of him; for girls, sometimes; sometimes women; even children. Ol' Button Face looked with the same cross-threaded eyes on the whole of humanity.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“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, The Hellbound Heart

“Horror fiction tends to be reactionary. It's usually about to return to the status quo -- the monster is the outsider who must be banished from the sanctum. But over and over again, I've created monsters who come from the outside and who call out to somebody to join them in the sanctum.”
― Clive Barker

“Todas las cosas se cansan con el tiempo y comienzan a buscar algún oponente
que las salve de sí mismas.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Todas las cosas se cansan con el tiempo y comienzan a buscar algún oponente que las salve de sí mismas”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Todas las cosas se cansan con el tiempo y comienzan a buscar algún oponente que las salve de sí mismas.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart