Clive Barker quotes

Clive Barker is an English author, film director, and visual artist known for his work in horror and fantasy. His stories often blend the grotesque with the fantastical, creating immersive worlds that challenge the boundaries of imagination. He has influenced modern horror with groundbreaking works like “Books of Blood” and the creation of the “Hellraiser” franchise. Here are 121 of his quotes:

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.

Clive Barker

Memory, prophecy and fantasy the past, the future and the dreaming moment between are all one country, living one immortal day. To know that is Wisdom. To use it is the Art.

Clive Barker

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.

Clive Barker

We are all our own graveyards I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived; and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.

Clive Barker

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.

Clive Barker

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

Clive Barker

Horror fiction shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.

Clive Barker

Evil, however powerful it seemed,could be undone by its own appetite.

Clive Barker

That which is imagined can never be lost.

Clive Barker

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

Clive Barker

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.

Clive Barker

Every body is a book of blood; Wherever we're opened, we're red.

Clive Barker

Life is short, and pleasures few, and holed the ship, and drowned the crew, But O! But O! How very blue the sea is!

Clive Barker

Witch, do this for me, Find me a moon made of longing. Then cut it sliver thin, and having cut it, hang it high above my beloved's house, so that she may look up tonight and see it, and seeing it, sigh for me as I sigh for her, moon or no moon.

Clive Barker

I've learned two things in my life. One that love is the beginning and end of all meaning. And two that it is the same thing whatever shape our souls have taken on this journey. Love is love. Is love.

Clive Barker

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

Clive Barker

any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

Clive Barker

Believe me, when I say; There are no two powers That command the soul. One is God The other is the tide. -Anon From the novel Abarat.

Clive Barker

Mischief nodded. 'It's true,' he conceded. 'You're in the company of eight world-class thieves,' he said, not without a little touch of pride. 'Saints we are not.' But then,' said Deaux-Deaux, 'who is?' he thought on this. 'Besides saints.

Clive Barker

I haven't even had a life I could call my own, and you're ready to slot me into the grand design. Well, I don't think I want to go. I want to be my own design.

Clive Barker

All things are true. God's an Astronaut. Oz is Over the Rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters live." - Peloquin.

Clive Barker

Study nothing except in the knowledge that you already knew it. Worship nothing except in adoration of your true self. And fear nothing except in the certainty that you are your enemy's begetter and its only hope of healing.

Clive Barker