01c. 1952 ADNow, I don't believe that a god exists. I think that gods are creation of men, by men, and for men. What has happened over the many centuries now, the better part of two thousand in fact, is that God has been slowly and steadily accruing power. His church has been accruing power, and the men who run that church, and they are all men, are not about to give it up. If they give it up, they give up luxury, they give up comfort.Clive Barker / quote ↗
02c. 1952 ADShe had witnessed in nauseating detail how the human world worked: its rituals of comfort (television, food, religion); its appetite for poison (television, food, religion); and for the monstrous edifices of desire (television, food, religion): she understood them all.Clive Barker / quote ↗
03c. 1952 ADI have deeper journeys to take. Metaphysical journeys to see Christ. Shaman journeys. It's what I have been elected by God to do.Clive Barker / quote ↗
04c. 1952 ADPeter Pan has to be the book of my childhood. Come to think of it, it's the book of my adulthood too. It's a book which, in the reading of it, takes me back to editions that I've had and lost, with various illustrators' work in them. It brings back moments sitting reading it with my mother. It brings back my first contact with the Disney cartoon. It brings back standing in the play-yard when I was a kid, when the wind was really blowing, and closing my eyes, spreading my arms and pretending I could fly. It brings back childhood dreams of flying. It brings back the first encounter I ever had with an invented world... Never Never Land was really the first journey I took to an invented world which I believed in wholly and completely. I remember the immense solidarity that I felt with the Lost Boys, with Peter, with the Indians - how much I wanted to be a Red Indian - how much the saving of Tiger Lily meant to me as a kid, how much I wanted to one day wake up and save an Indian squaw from drowning.Clive Barker / quote ↗
05c. 1952 ADI don't like crowds of any kind. A dinner party of more than six people is not, for me, a pleasure. I get less social as I get older... I am very resistant to anything that keeps me away from the business of making these journeys into the fantastique. They are my reason for being on the planet, as far as I can comprehend, and I pursue them to the cost of almost anything.Clive Barker / quote ↗
06c. 1952 ADAs to my mouth, of all my features, I wish I could possess my mouth again, just as it had been before the fire. I had my mother’s lips, generous below and above; and what kissing I had practiced, mainly on my hand or on a lonely pig, had convinced me that my lips would be the source of my good fortune. I would kiss with them, and lie with them, I would make victims and willing slaves of anyone my eyes desired, simply by talking a little, and following the talk with kisses, and the kisses with demands. And they’d melt into compliance, everyone of them, happy to perform the most demeaning acts as long as I was there to reward them with a long, tongue-tied kiss when they were done. But the fire didn’t spare my lips; it took them too, erasing them utterly.Clive Barker / quote ↗
07c. 1952 ADThe flawlessly beautiful were flawlessy happy, weren't they? To Kristy this had always seemed self-evident. Tonight, however, the alcohol made her wonder if envy hadn't blinded her. Perhaps to be flawless was another kind of sadness.Clive Barker / quote ↗
09c. 1952 ADLet’s prioritise here. At the risk of stating the obvious, this isn’t going to be easy. We need to find Norma as fast as we can, avoid the powerful demon that wants me as his slave, and then get the fuck out of Hell. I’m sure we’ll encounter some heinous, unthinkable, soul-scarring shit along the way, but hopefully we make it out alive.Clive Barker / quote ↗
10c. 1952 ADBorn from different parents, they were siblings in death, destroyed by the same hand.Clive Barker / quote ↗
11c. 1952 ADI was cured in my new infamy of all the tired wisdom of age. I would never weary into that tired state again---I swore to myself, I would always be this raw, wet child hereafter...Clive Barker / quote ↗
12c. 1952 ADDream!Forge yourself and riseOut of your mind and into others.Men, be women.Fish, be flies.Girls, take beards.Sons, be your mothers.The future of the world now liesIn coral wombs behind our eyes.Clive Barker / quote ↗
13c. 1952 ADAngels have very nasty tempers. Especially when they’re feeling righteous.Clive Barker / quote ↗
14c. 1952 ADWe cry for ourselves, don't we? Not for the dead. The dead are past caring.Clive Barker / quote ↗
15c. 1952 ADIf you want to be a big success then it becomes a dick showing contest, and that's not what it's about. It can't be about 'My book sold more copies than your book.' It can't be about 'More people went to see my movie than went to see your movie.' If it is about that, then Danielle Steel must be an extraordinarily wonderful author because she sells so many copies. You can't do calculations that way.What interests me is holding the vision: doing something that is yours and making sure that it can't be like anyone else's.Clive Barker / quote ↗
16c. 1952 ADThey knew a lot, the dead. How many times had she said to Harry they were the world’s greatest untapped resource? It was true. All they’d seen, all they’d suffered, all they’d triumphed over – lost to a world in need of wisdom.Clive Barker / quote ↗
17c. 1952 ADLet 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.Clive Barker / quote ↗
18c. 1952 ADJourney to the end of day, Come the fire-fly, Come the moon; Say a prayer for God's good grace And sleep with lore upon your face.Clive Barker / quote ↗
19c. 1952 ADPerhaps the House had heard Harvey wishing for a full moon, because when he and Wendell traipsed upstairs and looked out the landing window, there--hanging between the bare branches of the trees--was a moon as wide and as white as a dead man's smile.Clive Barker / quote ↗
20c. 1952 ADWitch, do this for me,Find me a moonmade of longing.Then cut it sliver thin,and having cut it,hang it highabove my beloved's house,so that she may look uptonightand see it,and seeing it, sigh for meas I sigh for her,moon or no moon.Clive Barker / quote ↗
21c. 1952 ADZombies are the ideal late twentieth-century monsters. A zombie is the one thing you can't deal with. It survives anything. Frankenstein's monster and Dracula could be sent down in so many ways. Zombies, though, fall outside all this. You can't argue with them. They just keep coming at you.Clive Barker / quote ↗
22c. 1952 ADZombies are the liberal nightmare. Here you have the masses, whom you would love to love, appearing at your front door with their faces falling off; and you’re trying to be as humane as you possibly can, but they are, after all, eating the cat. And the fear of mass activity, of mindlessness on a national scale, underlies my fear of zombies.Clive Barker / quote ↗
23c. 1952 ADDidn't open the box? What was it last time? Didn't know what it was? And yet we do keep finding each other, don't we? - CenobiteClive Barker / quote ↗
24c. 1952 ADWhy'd you want to sing about sad things?" Candy had asked him."Because any fool can be happy," he'd said to her."It takes a man with real heart"—he'd made a fist and laid it against his chest—"to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.Clive Barker / quote ↗
