Quotes from Clive Barker

When you hire Harry D'Amour, things have a tendency to become … complicated.

Men. Young men. Legal age, mind you. But young nonetheless. And it's not what you think. When we meet, we make … magic.

Experience was made up of endless ambiguities—of motive, of feeling, of cause and effect—and if he was to win under such circumstances, he had to understand how those ambiguities worked.

Ricky tasted something he hadn't experienced since childhood: the panic of losing the hand of a guardian. In this case the lost parent was his sanity. Somewhere

A jug of his urine Ã¢â'¬â€œ the product of seven days' collection Ã¢â'¬â€œ stood on the left of the altar, should they require some spontaneous gesture of self-defilement.

What are you trying to prove? Do you think if you kill enough people in the worst ways imaginable they'll give you a name like the Madman, or the Butcher? It doesn't matter how many abhorrent tortures you devise. You'll always be the Pinhead.

No matter how fantastical the story, true life experience gives it credibility. Dropping in elements of your own life, telling bits of detail borrowed from your memory bank, give the reader a feeling of assurance. It's the old story about how to tell a lie. Don't make it all up, tell the lie with large dollops of truth. The truth can give foundation to the most outrageous of lies.

Revulsion gave heat to his heals.

Whoopee,' she said quietly, on her face the distracted look that had obsessed so many of the opposite sex over the years. She'd forgotten most of them. The ones who'd fought over her; the ones who'd lost their wives in their pursuit of her; even those who'd sold their sanity to find her equal: all were forgotten. History had never much engaged her. It was the future that glittered in her mind's eye, now more than ever.

Every moment she wasted saying No to what she KNEW, was a moment lost to comprehension. That her worldview couldn't contain such a mystery without shattering was its liability, and a problem for another day.

You know, as a child I thought somebody came and took the world away in the night and then came back and unrolled it all again the following morning.

He gave a moment's consideration to the possibility of lingering to wash his face and hands (maybe even to changing his puke-splattered shirt), but he decided to forgo cleanliness in favor of making a fast exit.

This idea stayed with me for several years before I found an adequate way to express it. I called the sea Quiddity, and slowly developed a mythology around it. Human beings would enter Quiddity, the dream-sea, three times, I decided. Once when they were born, once when they slept beside the person they would love most in their lives, and once before they died. Three life-changing immersions in the sea of the unconscious. Three confrontations with the secret show of our dreams.

Do unto others, boy, before they do unto you.

Nothing is fixed. In and out the shuttle goes fact and fiction, mind and matter, woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that hidden amongst them is a filigree which will with time become a world.

Arnie had always called her a dreamer, and maybe he was right about that.

Men and your hunts," Lilith went on, addressing, it seemed, some larger error in the Duke's sex. "If you hadn't been out killing healthy stags and boars in the first place, you could have married and lived and loved. But"—she shrugged—"we do as our instincts dictate, yes? And yours brought you here. To the very edge of your own grave.

ignorant of the place it had been and blind to where it was headed.

This, no doubt, was the call 33 had heard. Bored with his balanced diet of maize and maple peas, tired of the pecking order of the loft and the predictability of each day — the bird had wanted out; wanted up and away. A day of high life; of food that had to be chased a little, and tasted all the better for that; of the companionship of wild things. All this went through Cal's head, in a vague sort of way, while he watched the circling flocks.

Imagination was true power: it worked transformations wealth and influence never could.

With Floyd we had three hundred and ninety-eight years between us. All that bitter experience, he said, and not one of us wise.

Everything tires with time , and starts to seek some opposition , to save it from itself.

except that she was sleeping not in preparation for a new day but for endless night.

Heaven will provide. Or else it won't, and I'll go hungry.