Quotes from Clive Barker

I will say it one last time: Demonation! The feeling of it! There are no words -how can there be?- to describe what it feels like to become words, to feel your life encoded, and laid out in black ink on white paper. All my love and hatred, melted into words. It was like the End of the World.

There was a memory and a promise of blood in the air.

They will all abandon you. All you have left is my desire for you.

At best you can hold death at bay, you can pretend it isn't there; but to deny it totally is a sickness. And I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems, and, perversely perhaps, to enjoy a vicarious confrontation with them.

Let us not neglect the forbidden. Let us not sophisticate ourselves out of the cheap thrill and chill of it: the story told for perversity's sake, and all the better for that; the image created because an artist gets tired of reasons sometimes, and wants to dredge up some picture he's been haunted by, and parade it like a new tattoo. I go with it, readily.

I want to be remembered as an imaginer, someone who used his imagination as a way to journey beyond the limits of self, beyond the limits of flesh and blood, beyond the limits of even perhaps life itself, in order to discover some sense of order in what appears to be a disordered universe. I'm using my imagination to find meaning, both for myself and, I hope, for my readers.-Clive Barker

Beautiful, Grillo said. Would Swift approve? Fuck Swift. Somebody should have.

People are like books. Everywhere they're opened, they're read.

The extraordinary's the norm.

Who can call a man dead whose words still hush and whose sentiments move?

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.

What worth was a man who could not be haunted?

I don't want to see another church; the smell of the places makes me sick. Stale incense, old sweat, and lies... In the Hills, the Cities

Well, it was most likely too late; there would not be time for me to flagellate myself for every dishonorable deed in that list, nor any chance to make good the harms I'd done. Minor harms, to be sure, in the scheme of things; but large enough to regret.

The moon had risen behind him, the color of a shark's underbelly. It lit the ruined walls, and the skin of his arms and hands, with its sickly light, making him long for a mirror in which to study his face. Surely he'd be able to see the bones beneath the meat; the skull gleaming the way his teeth gleamed when he smiled. After all, wasn't that what a smile said? Hello, world, this is the way I'll look when the wet parts are rotted.

It was as though in these last minutes together--when they had so much to say--they could say nothing of the least significance, for fear it open the floodgates.

I'm a poet,' the young man said, 'And it's my job to remember the sadness of things.

Let the mad find wisdom in their madness for the sane, and let the sane be grateful. Is that a famous saying? Maybe if I say it often enough.

The un-people, the anti-tribe, humanity's sack unpicked and sewn together again with the moon inside.

I've never worked where it was hard to be gay. Besides, being gay is a spectacular irrelevance to getting on with your life.

Hopelessness is reasonable. But nothing of worth in my life came of reason. Not my love, not my art, not my heaven. So I am hopeful

Her skin was flawless and always cool, always pale; her body was long, like her hair, like her fingers, like her laughter; and her eyes, oh, her eyes, had every season of leaf in them: the twin greens of spring and high summer, the golds of autumn, and, in her rages, black midwinter rot.

Make a fist. Lightly. Leave enough room for a breath to pass through. Good. Good. All magic proceeds from breath. Remember that.

It's all part of the dance, she thought; the dust, her hands, the light that was spiraling around her: it's all part of the same wonderful dance. And I'm in it.