Quotes by "Clive Barker"

Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

I dreamed I spoke in another's language, I dreamed I lived in another's skin, I dreamed I was my own beloved, I dreamed I was a tiger's kin. I dreamed that Eden lived inside me, And when I breathed a garden came, I dreamed I knew all of Creation, I dreamed I knew the Creator's name. I dreamed--and this dream was the finest-- That all I dreamed was real and true, And we would live in joy forever, You in me, and me in you.

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

I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories. This is a gift from God, who spoke our species into being, but left the end of our story untold. That mystery is troubling to us. How could it be otherwise? Without the final part, we think, how are we to make sense of all that went before: which is to say, our lives? So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.

[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.

Writing about the unholy is one way of writing about what is sacred.

Here is a list of terrible things, The jaws of sharks, a vultures wings The rabid bite of the dogs of war, The voice of one who went before, But most of all the mirror's gaze, Which counts us out our numbered days.

There is no such thing as originality. It has all been said before, suffered before. If a person knows that, is it any wonder love becomes mechanical and death just a scene to be shunned? There is no absolute knowledge to be gained from either. Just another ride on the merry-go-round, another blurred scene of faces smiling and faces grieved.

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.

As long as they could still be moved by a minor chord, or brought to a crisis of tears by scenes of lovers reunited; as long as there was room in their cautious hearts for games of chance, and laughter in the face of God, that must surely be enough to save them, at the last. If not, there was no hope for any living thing.

It is great good health to believe as the Hindus do that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one s dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical. It is sickness of the profoundest kind to believe that there is one reality. There is sickness in any piece of work or any piece of art seriously attempting to suggest that the idea that there is more than one reality is somehow redundant.

We're both thieves, Harvey Swick. I take time. You take lives. But in the end we're the same: both Thieves of Always.

Funny that. We live in islands of Hours and we never seem to have time enough for anything...

I'll love you until the death of love

I don't take accusations of selling out lightly.

Teaming up with Adaptive Studios and Shudder is a wonderful opportunity to support emerging filmmakers in finding the new horror icon. This is also a great chance to scare and entertain audiences at the same time.

It is great good health to believe, as the Hindus do, that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one's dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical.

I have the normal complement of anxieties, neuroses, psychoses and whatever else - but I'm absolutely nothing special.

I don't feel there's any reason to apologise for having a wicked imagination. I think it's important as a maker of fantasy and of horror.

We live in the Age of the Next New Thing; we're assaulted day and night by tastemakers telling us what the next hit will be, the next style, the next cool.