Quotes from Clive Barker

First, my love and thanks to Ben Smith, my Hollywood agent, who has been a true visionary in a job that is often maligned (in this book, for instance)

Yes, fantastic fiction can be intricately woven into the texture of our daily lives, addressing important issues in fabulist form. But it also serves to release us for a time from the definitions that confine our daily selves; to unplug us from a world that wounds and disappoints us, allowing us to venture into places of magic and transformation.

I don't plot or outline, though I may take a few notes here and there, instead I let my dream world fill up each night with a segment of the story. I do this without worrying about it, or trying to force it, and when I wake up the dream bag is full, and I can go to my writing desk, and dream all over the page.

Magic is the first and last religion of the world. It has the power to make us whole.

He wouldn't be remembered well.

All Darkness was one darkness in the end. Of heart or Heavens, one Darkness.

Or were they breed who had died from their half-life, caught in the sun, perhaps, or withered by longing?

Among his memories of the whole and the human, sharpest was that of Decker.

Do you understand?" the figure beside the first speaker demanded. Its voice, unlike that of its companion, was light and breathy—the voice of an excited girl. Every inch of its head had been tattooed with an intricate grid, and at every intersection of horizontal and vertical axes a jeweled pin driven through to the bone. Its tongue was similarly decorated. "Do you even know who we are?" it asked.

There were no chambers now along the passageway and consequently no lights. There was a glow up ahead, however—fitful and cold, but bright enough to illuminate both the ground she stumbled over, which was bare earth, and the silvery frost on the walls.

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.

The way she saw it, she was lucky. She wasn't really blind—she just saw a different world from most other folks, and that put her in a unique position to do some good in the world.

tonight they all wished they could cut from their mind's configuration the part that knew—had always known, since infancy—that the great wound of the world was deepening, day on day, and they had no choice but feel the hurt as if it was their own, which of course in part it was.

Si el amor se alimenta de música, seguid tocando (Shakepeare)

Here was a place sacred to the dead, who were not the living ceased, but almost another species, requiring rites and prayers that belonged uniquely to them.

So intent was Frank upon solving the puzzle of Lemarchand's box that he didn't hear the great bell begin to ring.

Nothing, I had come to believe by the end, was more illusory than the idea of ending.

The carcass closest to him was the remains of the pimply youth he'd seen in Car One. The body hung upside-down, swinging back and forth to the rhythm of the train, in unison with its three fellows; an obscene danse macabre. Its arms dangled loosely from the shoulder joints, into which gashes an inch or two deep had been made, so the bodies would hang more neatly.

We're making strange fictions of strange things inside ourselves.

This was the nadir, surely. They had no further to fall.

Muck held the whip hand.

He liked the phrase "mother's tit." It said so much, so simply. Momma's tit had a good deal more power to move these men than her apple pie.

He started down the slope towards it, dressed in the blood of his enemy.

Lo tocó como nunca antes se había atrevido a hacerlo, acariciando su cuerpo con la punta de los dedos muy, muy suavemente, recorriendo la piel levantada como una mujer ciega leyendo braille.