Quotes from Clive Barker

I wanted to fold into the 'Hellraiser' narrative something about the guy - the Frenchman Lemarchand - who made the mysterious box, which raises Pinhead. I figured, 'Well, what would have happened to him?' He might well have been taken to Devil's Island, and I thought that would be a pretty cool place to start the movie.

'Hellraiser' was what 'Hellraiser' was. It was a $900k movie, and there wasn't anything I would have done differently. But 'Nightbreed' was taken away from me. It was thought that its meaning wasn't... Its meaning didn't chime with the producers.

I say 'spectacle' rather than 'story' because in the end, it isn't the intricacies of narrative that draw us to horror films. When it's there, I'm grateful for the director's skill at telling an exquisitely nuanced tale filled with psychological insight, but it is the spectacles that I take home with me.

I have a vision of the world as being a lot darker, perhaps, than I did when I was 31 and wrote the 'Books of Blood'.

What I tried to do is deliver movies that have worked for me more than once.

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

Nobody cares for the product I, and a host of other horror directors, make.

I'm not the expert on the great gameplay. I come in for the character design, monsters, atmosphere. I'm not the technician.

Superman is, after all, an alien life form. He is simply the acceptable face of invading realities.

My life is in the art that I make, and I'm very happy with it.

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

Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.

I was always aware of the ticking clock of time, always. I was very aware that I had a lot to do, and I wanted to do those things in the best possible way that I could and probably the biggest way I possibly could.

There's a lot of art and comics and movies being paid homage to by game designers.

Some people think that horror films are some sort of second class filmmaking, and the only way to bypass that thinking is being proud of the fact that we do it.

If there was a horror movie showing somewhere in Liverpool between 1967 and 1975, I saw it.

I don't like PG-13 horror movies. I think they're a contradiction in terms.

Hell is reimagined by every generation. We have to reinvent the worst so that we can reinvent the best.

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

For a writer, and particularly a writer of my genre, which is the fantastical, I think that it's to my advantage to feel remote from and disconnected from the world of deal making.

I used to think that you'd open the door, and there was Narnia. Increasingly, I think it's all around us.

My grandfather was a ship's cook, and he came back from the Far East very often with strange little toys. One of the things he brought back was a puzzle box, which obsessed me for a long time.

You just have to trust your own madness.

We actually say in 'Nightbreed,' 'God is an astronaut, Oz is over the rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters go.' There's a lovely sense in which there's a simple thesis being played out here. These are things you understand as a child out on the play yard.