Quotes from Clive Barker

You don't think that room downstairs was made by the Devil, or his wife?" "I don't want to know who made it," Tammy said. "But I know who fed it; who made it important. People. Just like you and me. Addicted to the place.

The true Wonderland was not like that, he knew. It was as much shadow as sunlight, and its mysteries could only be unveiled when your wits were about used up and your mind close to cracking.

Every man is his own Mephistopheles, don't you think?

I don't remember nineteen," Will said. "Or twenty, come to that. I have a very vague recollection of twenty-one—" He laughed. "But you get to a place when you're so high you're not high anymore.

What matters is there's something in you which is unique to you. And that's the only thing that matters. Not being the next Clive Barker, not being the next… whatever. What matters is being the next whoever you are. The only whoever you are. And - right or wrong - I'm the only Clive Barker.

Books are like people, when they are open they are red

The winds mourn and whine was wiser than any psalm, prayer, or profession of love he'd ever heard. But

Everybody is a book of blood; Wherever we're opened, we're red. The Book of Blood The dead have highways.

a creature of impulse.

When it was all done, Suzanna found her voice, thanking both the grave diggers and their mothers. "After all that digging," said the eldest of the girls, "I just hope he grows." "He will," said her mother, with no trace of indulgence. "They always do." On

He was no longer innocent. With this slaughter he became the killer Decker had persuaded him he was. In murdering the prophet he made the prophecy true.

I was watching the power at work behind the face of the world. What I had always assumed to be a calamitous unseen war, waged in sky and rock and on occasion invading your human world, was not a bloody battle, with legions slaughtering one another; it was this endless fish-market bartering.

We cannot believe, we men, that power will ever reside happily in the body of a woman, unless that power is a male child. Not true power. The power must be in male hands, God-given. That's what our fathers tell us, idiots that they are.

Having a routine that bordered on stagnancy had its benefits.

And why not? The world made miracles like this every moment of every day: egg into chick, seed into flower, maggot into fly. Now man into fox? was that possible? Oh yes, said the House of the World. Yes, and yes, and always yes-

He looked too drained to argue, his stare somehow unfinished, as though it had a place it wanted to rest but couldn't find.

Of all the rash and midnight promises made in the name of love, none, Boone now knew, was more certain to be broken than "I'll never leave you." What

Things came and went away; that was a kind of magic. And in between? Pursuits and conjurings, horrors, guises. The occasional joy. That there was room for joy, ah! that was magic too.

I know many a strong man undone by marriage.

She would wait and watch, as she had always watched and waited, hoping that such a puzzle would one day come to her. But if it failed to show itself she would not grieve too deeply, for fear that the mending of broken hearts be a puzzle neither wit nor time had the skill to solve.

Dead isn't bad," Narcisse said. "It isn't even that different.

It was bad enough that these creatures had children and art; that they might also have vision was too dangerous a thought to entertain.

I think sometimes horror fiction has a significance which we forget, which is if you fear something in fiction, you have the chance of a resolution. You have a chance that the story will finish itself.

I wonder if the reverse is not also in some way true. That the artist is constantly working on an elaborate and fantasticated self-portrait, but at the end has drawn, unbeknown, a picture of the world.