Quotes from Clive Barker

She was indeed tired , as she'd claimed , but it wasn't the cooking that exhausted her. It was the effort of suppressing her contempt for he damn fools who were gathered in the lounge below. She'd called them friends once , these half-wits , with their poor jokes and poorer pretensions.

A book is dead until you read it.

I want an explanation!" "I'll give you one," Maxine said: "You're crazy.

Fear in front and bedlam behind.

He was mystery, he was darkness, he was all she had dreamed of. And if she would only free him he would service her -oh yes- until her pleasure reached that thereshold that, like all theresholds, was a place where the strong grew stronger, and the weak perished.

Horror shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory.

She was indeed tired , as she'd claimed , but it wasn't the cooking that exhausted her. It was the effort of suppressing her contempt for the damn fools who were gathered in the lounge below. She'd called them friends once , these half-wits , with their poor jokes and poorer pretensions.

Like a prisoner without hope of parole she took what entertainment she could find to ease the passage of time.

The stench of disinfectant could not entirely mask the odor of human pain.

Just a foul stench, as if every dead man in the vicinity had sat up and expelled a breath

Time would be precious from now on. It would tick by, of course, as it always had, but Harvey was determined he wouldn't waste it with sighs and complaints. He'd fill every moment with the seasons he'd found in his heart: hopes like birds on a spring branch; happiness like a warm summer sun; magic like the rising mists of autumn. And best of all, love; love enough for a thousand Christmases.

Speculative horror has become our generation's most viable tradition of the passed story.

she knew from experience there was no gainsaying the bigotry of faith.

Existence is just a Mobius strip with Love scrawled on one side and Death upon the other.

It'd just be another opinion," Maxine said, poking at the fire with the stick she'd picked up. "People would go on believing their favorite versions." "You think?" "For sure. You can't change people's opinion about stuff like that. It's embedded. They believe what they believe.

Maybe if they didn't tell you the stories ... they'd actually go out and do it.

It would not have made a good book, I think. It would have been a folly. Its best telling was in these paragraphs: they contain all the ironies a tome would have contained, and waste less ink.

I've heard writers defend some pretty appalling stuff by arguing that they have an obligation to depict the world as it is, but fiction has no such obligation. It's not a mirror to reality, it's a prism. It refracts experience. Also, I think some writers are reluctant to admit that part of their aim is to shock the reader, and that's a downward spiral. We have, as consumers, become increasingly inured to violence. Most of us are pretty hard to shock.

I used to live in Los Angeles," Norma said. "Off a winding road called Coldheart Canyon.

Why do boys always love talking about ghosts and murders and hangings?' 'Because it's exciting,' Wendell said.

The pleasure of the supernatural short story lies in not having to explain anything. They're just glimpses, a momentary lifting of the veil.

Try to finish everything. You'll always find your enthusiasm for a project waning as it goes on, and you'll be tempted by a new idea, but learn to ignore the latter and continue with the former. If you start abandoning work, you set a bad precedent, and establish a pattern for the years to come. And be nice to booksellers: never let them pay for a round.

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 its zeal to spellbind, how utterly unenchanting.

You fucking idiot! What does it matter what it costs to kill it? It's not human. It's out of Hell.