Clive Barker Quotes

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Clive Barker

Profession : Writer

Birth : October 5, 1952

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.

Clive Barker

My imagination is my polestar; I steer by that.

Clive Barker

We actually say in 'Nightbreed,' 'God is an astronaut, Oz is over the rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters go.' There's a lovely sense in which there's a simple thesis being played out here. These are things you understand as a child out on the play yard.

Clive Barker

One of the things I'm trying to do over and over again in my books is create new mythologies, create new ways to understand the complexity of the world. I think what mythology does is impress upon chaotic experience the patterns, hierarchies and shapes which allow us to interpret the chaos and make fresh sense of it.

Clive Barker

All I've ever wanted to do is darken the day and brighten the night.

Clive Barker

Gather experience... Look at what you should not look at. A feeling of anxiety is the sure and certain evidence that you should do this.

Clive Barker

I don't take accusations of selling out lightly.

Clive Barker

I love meeting people who've read my books. The prime reason to be on the planet is to make things I can show to other people: paintings, books, movies.

Clive Barker

It is the creature that stands at the center of horror movies, not those who have made it their business to bring the beast down. We're all the same.

Clive Barker

I love the idea of stories being about great beginnings and terrible endings.

Clive Barker

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

Clive Barker

'The Scarlet Gospels' does, by general consensus, seem to mark a new high - or low, depending on your point of view - in its excessiveness, in its extremities.

Clive Barker

Pinhead needed to say goodbye. He had a farewell speech to make. It was truly as simple as that.

Clive Barker

I'm a gay man, living an out life for a long time, and it's tiring and anger-making to hear people continue to spit out the same old dreary cliches about the fact that gay men are doing something unnatural, and there'll be a price to pay when the Rapture happens.

Clive Barker

I think I'm less and less labelled a 'horror writer'. The books tend not to go on horror shelves any more, and when they do, I tend to take them off.

Clive Barker

As for theatre, there's ups and downs to everything. Theatre is ephemeral. But that is part of its charm because you can always say the production was better than it was.

Clive Barker

For a writer, and particularly a writer of my genre, which is the fantastical, I think that it's to my advantage to feel remote from and disconnected from the world of deal making.

Clive Barker

Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.

Clive Barker

There was supposedly no point showing 'Nightbreed' to critics because the people who see these movies don't read reviews, in brackets, even if they can read at all! Immediately it was disqualified from serious criticism. Therefore, it had to be sold to the lowest common denominator.

Clive Barker

I want to be able to still surprise myself, even shock myself, whether it be sexual content, whether it be about the theological content, whatever. I want to be able to knock myself sideways. Otherwise, what a waste of a life that would be.

Clive Barker