Quotes from Clive Barker

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.

Born from different parents, they were siblings in death, destroyed by the same hand.

What did I see? It's no use telling you there are no words. Of course there are words; there are always words. The question is: can I wield them well enough to evoke the power of what I witnessed? That I doubt. But let me do my best.

Kaufman calculated the risks of his situation: the mathematics of panic.

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." Eight lines, and it was all over;

Life was not a reversible commodity. Things passed away, never to return: species, hopes, years.

She had long ago accepted that life was unfair. But why , when she'd accepted the bitter truth , did circumstance insist on rubbing her face in it?

Part of me thinks we're fools to trust either of the, Hapexamendios or His Reconciler. If He was such a loving God, why did He do so much harm? And don't tell me He moves in mysterious ways because that's so much horse shit and we both know it.

They knew a lot, the dead. How many times had she said to Harry they were the world's greatest untapped resource? It was true. All they'd seen, all they'd suffered, all they'd triumphed over—lost to a world in need of wisdom. And why? Because at a certain point in the evolution of the species a profound superstition was sewn into the human heart that the dead were to be considered sources of terror rather than enlightenment.

Quitoon knew the world well. It wasn't jut Humankind and its works he knew, but all manner of things without any clear connection between them. He knew about spices, parliaments, salamanders, lullabies, curses, forms of discourse and disease; of riddles, chains, and sanities; ways to make sweetmeats, love and widows; tales to tell children, tales to tell their parents, tales to tell yourself on days when everything you know means nothing.

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.

I will treat you with my knife the way you've treated my pages with your merciless eyes. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards.

And the stories she'd been told, were they confessions of uncommitted crimes, accounts of the worst imaginable, imagined to keep fiction from becoming fact? The thought chased its own tail: these terrible stories still needed a first cause, a well-spring from which they leaped... Were these inventions common currency, as Purcell had claimed? Was there a place, however small, reserved in every heart for the monstrous?

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore. —André Gide, The Counterfeiters

What do the good know?' he said. 'Except what the bad teach them by their excesses?

My imagination is my polestar; I steer by that.

Indifference was the best remedy. Once you conceded defeat, life was a feather bed.

We made our choice, he said. We hunted for them, we guarded their brats. God knows, we helped them make a civilization, didn't we? And why? I said I didn't know; it was beyond me. Because, he said, we thought they knew how to take care of things. How to keep the world full of meat and flowers.

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.

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke — Aye, and what then? —S. T. Coleridge, Anima Poetae

Before she could look to find a wound he had control of the vision once again, but like a juggler attempting to hold too many balls in the air catching one meant loosing another.

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.

For now, they had simpler concerns. Keeping the children from the roofs at night, the bereaved from crying out too loud, the young in summer from falling in love with the human.

That's half of your trouble, muttered the crocodile. You believe everything's true. That's because everything is, replied Mr. Bacchus.