Clive Barker Quotations | Page 2

To call you excrement would be an insult to the product of my bowels.

One man's pornography is another man's theology.

We burn so hard, but we shed so little light; it makes us crazy and sad.

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.

Behind their eyes the hope was sickening and in many, dead. They lived from event to event with a subtle terror of the gap between, filling up their lives with distractions to avoid the emptiness where curiosity should have been.

To you who have never died, may I say: Welcome to the world!

I've never worked where it was hard to be gay. Besides, being gay is a spectacular irrelevance to getting on with your life.

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.

It is great good health to believe as the Hindus do that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one s dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical. It is sickness of the profoundest kind to believe that there is one reality. There is sickness in any piece of work or any piece of art seriously attempting to suggest that the idea that there is more than one reality is somehow redundant.

There are lives lived for love, and lives lived for art. We, happy band, have chosen the later persuasion.

The sun rose like a stripper, keeping its glory well covered by cloud till it seemed there'd be no show at all.

Flesh could not keep its glamour, nor eyes their sheen. They would go to nothing soon. But monsters are forever.

Midian is where the monsters go.

Life is short And pleasures few And holed the ship And drowned the crew But o! But o! How very blue the sea is.

I dreamed I spoke in another's language, I dreamed I lived in another's skin, I dreamed I was my own beloved, I dreamed I was a tiger's kin. I dreamed that Eden lived inside me, And when I breathed a garden came, I dreamed I knew all of Creation, I dreamed I knew the Creator's name. I dreamed--and this dream was the finest-- That all I dreamed was real and true, And we would live in joy forever, You in me, and me in you.

..which should teach you something about this world. That it's a place where whatever you work for and care about is bound to be taken away from you sooner or later, and there isn't a thing you can do about it.

I've always thought that the most extraordinary special effect you could do is to buy a child at the moment of its birth, sit it on a little chair and say, "You'll have three score years and ten," and take a photograph every minute. "And we'll watch you and photograph you for ten years after you die, then we'll run the film." Wouldn't that be extraordinary? We'd watch this thing get bigger and bigger, and flower to become extraordinary and beautiful, then watch it crumble, decay, and rot.

Never believe your eyes

How many human eyes...had snatched glimpses of their secret anatomies, down the passage of years?

I was a weird little kid. I was very irritable, bored, frustrated. I felt my imagination bubbling inside my head without having any way to express itself. Given a crayon and paper, I would not draw a train or a house. I would draw these monsters, beasts and demons.

We always think we are right, and - search as I have - there is no evil under the sun that somebody somewhere won't argue is actually a good, no idiocy that hasn't got its perfectly serious defenders, and no tyrant, past or present - no matter how bloody - without some bunch of zealot schmucks to defend him or his reputation till the last breath in their bodies - or preferably somebody else's.

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.

But I think humans are innately religious as a species, so you don't need a specific excuse for examining the perversely unholy.

And in time it will be as though men had never come to this perfect corner of the world-never called it paradise on earth, never despoiled it with their dream factories; and in the golden hush of the afternoon all that will be heard will be the flittering of dragonflies, and the murmur of hummingbirds as they pass from bower to bower, looking for a place to sup sweetness.

Keep it simple. Trust your imagination. Discover what is unique about your imagination. Don't simply read a story and copy it. I go into myself. Then I transcribe what visions I have. If those ideas are original, and you are devoted, you will go far.

Richard Christian Matheson is a master of compression. He knows how to catch a moment in words and convey it straight to the reader's heart.

One part of love is innocence One part of love is guilt One part the milk that in a sense Is soured as soon as spilt One part of love is sentiment One part of love is lust One part is the presentiment Of our return to dust

I really believe that there is an enormous appetite amongst readers for an originality of vision. In other words, be true to your own dreams and there will always be people who want to hear them.

Fear is a place where you just tell the truth

Writing a book is like masturbation, and making a movie is like an orgy.

The monsters act out our rage. They act on their worst impulses, which is appealing to a certain part of us. They get punished for it, but we've enjoyed the spectacle of their liberation.

I've held a brain in my hands, which is an extraordinary experience.

If we have nothing to do but service our own pleasure - because society has taught us that's all we're worth and we're exiled from positions of authority from which we could actually shape society - then we just become hedonists. Eventually, despite how great it may look on Saturday night, come Monday morning there's just purposelessness.

I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems of death.

I love meeting people who've read my books. The prime reason to be on the planet is to make things I can show to other people: paintings, books, movies.

Even winter — the hardest season, the most implacable — dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.

The world had seen so many Ages: the Age of Enlightenment; of Reformation; of Reason. Now, at last, the Age of Desire. And after this, an end to Ages; an end, perhaps, to everything.

By and large I think art is made by people who have discipline married to talent in sufficiently large amounts to work even if they don't feel like it. Anybody can get maudlin and decide to write poetry at 11 at night; the question is, can you do it at 8:30 on a Monday morning..?

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.

Angels have very nasty tempers. Especially when they’re feeling righteous.

You’ve always got me” “Always?” “Didn’t I just say so?” “Yes” “Am I liar? “ “No.” I lied.

Maybe the man had taken the wrong turning, but at least he'd travelled some extraordinary roads.

Journey to the end of day, Come the fire-fly, Come the moon; Say a prayer for God's good grace And sleep with lore upon your face.

O little one, My little one, Come with me, Your life is done. Forget the future, Forget the past. Life is over: Breathe your last.

Three is the number of those who do holy work; Two is the number of those who do lover's work; One is the number of those who do perfect evil Or perfect good.

Welcome to the worst nightmare of all, reality!

Often people who are wonderful with animals aren't always terribly good with human beings.

The great grey beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.

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.

Darkness always had its part to play. Without it, how would we know when we walked in the light? It’s only when its ambitions become too grandiose that it must be opposed, disciplined, sometimes—if necessary—brought down for a time. Then it will rise again, as it must.

The extraordinary's the norm.

I can see in your eyes that there’s no seam of untapped joy left in you. The best of life has come and gone. Those days when sudden epiphanies swept over you, and you had visions of the rightness of all things and of your place amongst them; they’re history. You’re in a darker place now.

There is no such thing as originality. It has all been said before, suffered before. If a person knows that, is it any wonder love becomes mechanical and death just a scene to be shunned? There is no absolute knowledge to be gained from either. Just another ride on the merry-go-round, another blurred scene of faces smiling and faces grieved.

Nothing happens carelessly. We’re not brought into the world without reason, even though we may never understand the reason. An infant that lives an hour, that dies before it can lay eyes on those who made it, even that soul did not live without purpose: this is my sudden certainty.

Perhaps sunlight had always been luminous, and doorways signs of greater passage than that of one room to another. But she’d not noticed it until now.

Well, it was most likely too late; there would not be time for me to flagellate myself for every dishonorable deed in that list, nor any chance to make good the harms I’d done. Minor harms, to be sure, in the scheme of things; but large enough to regret.

Why'd you want to sing about sad things?" Candy had asked him. "Because any fool can be happy," he'd said to her. "It takes a man with real heart" —he'd made a fist and laid it against his chest— "to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

We're both thieves, Harvey Swick. I take time. You take lives. But in the end we're the same: both Thieves of Always.

Leavening the flat bread of what we know, with the yeast of what we dream may come to pass.

The whole point about vision is that it's very individual, it's very personal, and it has to be confessional. It has to be something which hurts - the pulling out of it and putting it on the page hurts. Art can be about the individual writer's response to his or her condition, and if that response comes out of a predigested belief about what the audience wants to hear about the writer's condition, then it has no truth, it has no validity. You either write with your own blood or nobody's. Otherwise it's just ink.

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 .

Of all the rash and midnight promises made in the name of love, none, Boone now knew, was more certain to be broken than "I'll never leave you.

Words are sexier than flesh.

Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise. Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for something to quench its heat, and the mellowest of autumns will tire of gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its fruitfulness. Even winter — the hardest season, the most implacable — dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.

I'm a poet,' the young man said, 'And it's my job to remember the sadness of things.

Mutilation is the badge that can never be taken off, and sets us apart from all others. Pain is important to the bonding-a physical horror that bonds us ever tighter to all those who have partaken. The intensity of the experience helps to widen the gulf between us and those who have not shared.

True joy is a profound remembering; and true grief the same.

What worth was a man who could not be haunted?

She's...just a girl, you know. Like most girls: something and nothing.

My feet are killing me." "I knew somebody who had feet like that. They'd walk all over him. Archie Kashanian was his name. He used to wake up with footprints all over his chest, all over his face. It was the death of him, finally.

Perhaps a wiser eye than hers would be able to read tomorrow in tonight's stars, but where was the fun in that? It was better not to know. Better to be alive in the Here and the Now--in this bright, laughing moment--and let the Hours to come take care of themselves.

You'll learn, honey. Love can be the best thing in life. And it can be the worst. The absolute worst.

Anyway, it's gone. And there's nothing left in my pocket to charm you. So from now on it's going to have to be tears or nothing I'm afraid. That's all I've got left to tell you see: tears, tears, tears.

Wherever I go, I will speak of you with love.

We each die countless little deaths on our way to the last. We die out of shame as humiliation. We perish from despair. And, of course, we die for love.

Your flesh is killing your spirit. You have forsaken yourself.

I've always thought that sex and horror belonged together.

I know that I want to bring sex and horror together as I have been able to in my books.

I've dealt with a lot of producers who were pricks and I'm determined not to be that.

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

The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator's voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.

I've never felt so good in my life,

It's irritating, because I would like to make movies that were as unrelenting and as explicit in their metaphysical, sexual and violent imagery as the stories. But with the way censorship is at present, there's no way you can do that.

I do love these events. It is a chance to interact in a direct and personal way. So when I do agree to attend such an event, I wholeheartedly throw myself headlong into it.