457 Quotes by Clive Barker

Anyway, it’s gone. And there’s nothing left in my pocket to charm you. So from now on it’s going to have to be tears or nothing I’m afraid. That’s all I’ve got left to tell you see: tears, tears, tears.

The monsters act out our rage. They act on their worst impulses, which is appealing to a certain part of us. They get punished for it, but we’ve enjoyed the spectacle of their liberation.

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.

Has anyone here ever heard of the Harrowing?” Dale asked, breaking the silence. No one replied. “It was in the time between Christ’s crucifixion and his Resurrection,” he went on. “The story goes, Christ went down into Hell, walked among the damned, and set many of them free. Then he returned to Earth and broke the bondage of death. It’s supposedly the first and only amnesty Hell has ever known.

My father used to say: Every bird is one bird, and every book is one book, and every bird and every book is one thing too, under the words and the feathers.” He finished with a flourish, as though the meaning of this was self-evident.

But I think humans are innately religious as a species, so you don’t need a specific excuse for examining the perversely unholy.

I decided that I would do my best to be the worst thing Hell ever vomited forth.

Sometimes nature is even crueller than politics.

Not a classic reunion. The lover, on seeing his beloved, throws up down his shirt. But then, nothing that happened between Jacqueline and myself was ever quite normal.