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Clive Barker

Clive Barker Quotes

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Famous Clive Barker Quotes

“If 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.”

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Author:Clive Barker
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“After a battle lasting many ages, The Devil won, And said to God (who had been his Maker): "Lord, We are about to witness the unmaking of Creation By my hand. I would not wish you to think me cruel, So I beg you, take three things From this world before I destroy it. Three things, and then the rest will be wiped away." God thought for a little time. And at last He said: "No, there is nothing." The Devil was surprised. "Not even you, Lord?" he said. And God said: "No. Not even me.”

PoetryLossSadnessDevilTheologyNothingNihilism
Book:Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War
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“I'm interested in the places where sex reminds of me of death, where sex and love and passions bring one close to thinking about death. It may be my own problem, but sex reminds me of death very regulary. Anything which transforms one's life, as the sex act does, for half an hour or half a day, makes one look at oneself afresh. Think back to our adolescence and the way that sex looked to us then. It was quite an extraordinary thing-and it wasn't just ignorance that made it seem so. Familiarity makes us lose focus on how subversive sex is. It comes into our lives and breaks down our normal perception of ourselves.”

SexualityDeath Of A Loved One
Author:Clive Barker
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“As 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.”

FireKissMouth
Book:Mister B. Gone
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“Peter 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.”

InspirationReadingChildhoodBooks
Author:Clive Barker
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“Perhaps finding some new response to these experiences was out of the question when the sheer proliferation of travelers' tales had all but exhausted the lexicon of discovery. But it nevertheless irritated Gentle to hear himself responding in clichés. The traveler moved by unspoilt beauty or appalled by native barbarism. The traveler touched by primitive wisdom or caught breathless by undreamt-of-modernities. The traveler condescending; the traveler humbled; the traveler hungry for the next horizon or pining miserably for home.”

JourneyForeignersTravelingEpic JourneyStrange LandAmericanismsAmericans Abroad
Book:Imajica
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“I think that God that we have created and allowed to shape our culture through, essentially Christian theology is a pretty villainous creature. I think that one of the things that male patriarchal figure has done is, allowed under it's, his church, his wing, all kinds of corruptions and villainies to grow and fester. In the name of that God terrible wars have been waged, in the name of that God terrible sexism has been allowed to spread. There are children being born all across this world that don't have enough food to eat because that God, at least his church, tells the mothers and fathers that they must procreate at all costs, and to prevent procreation with a condom is in contravention with his laws. Now, I don't believe that God exists. I think that God is 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 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.”

ChurchPowerAtheismCrimeTerribleComfortHorrorAtheistCorruptionTheologyLuxurySexismAbsurdityChristian TheologyAtrocityVillainous
Author:Clive Barker
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“The extraordinary thing is this: that the moment you make a story or create an image that finds favour with an audience, you’ve effectively lost it. It toddles off, the little bastard; it becomes the property of the fans. It’s they who create around it their own mythologies; who make sequels and prequels in their imagination; who point out the inconsistencies in your plotting. I can envisage no greater compliment. What more could a writer or a film maker ever ask, than that their fiction be embraced and become part of the dream-lives of people who it’s likely he’ll never meet?”

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Book:Clive Barker's Hellraiser Vol. 1
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“Decker pulled the mask on. It smelt of his excitement. As soon as he breathed in he got a hard. Not the little sex-hard, but the death-hard; the murder-hard. It sniffed the air for him, even through the thickness of his trousers and underwear. It smelt the victim that ran ahead of him. The Mask didn't care that his prey was female; he got the murder-hard for anyone. In his time he'd had a heat for old men, pissing their pants as they went down in front of him; for girls, sometimes; sometimes women; even children. Ol' Button Face looked with the same cross-threaded eyes on the whole of humanity.”

CabalDeckerClive Barker
Book:Cabal
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“The bare bulb in the middle of the room dimmed and brightened, brightened and dimmed again. It had taken on the rhythm of the bell, burning its hottest on each chime. In the troughs between the chimes the darkness in the room became utter; it was as if the world he had occupied for twenty-nine years had ceased to exist. Then the bell would sound again, and the bulb burn so strongly it might never have faltered, and for a few precious seconds he was standing in a familiar place, with a door that led out and down and into the street, and a window through which-had he but the will (or strength) to tear the blinds back-he might glimpse a rumor of morning.”

Light Bulb
Book:The Hellbound Heart
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“Her gaze went with her, into a room with walls of frozen earth, and a floor the same, the latter split from corner to corner, and a fissure opened in it from which a flame column rose four or five times the size of a man. There was bitter cold off it rather than heat, and no reassuring flicker in its heart. Instead its innards churned upon themselves, turning over and over some freight of stuff which she failed to recognize at first, but her appalled stare rapidly interpreted. There was a body in the fire, hacked limb from limb, human enough that she recognized it as flesh, but no more than that. Baphomet's doing presumably, some torment visited on a transgressor. Boone said the Baptizer's name even now, and she readied herself for sight of its face. She had it too, but from inside the flame, as the creature there--not dead, but alive, not Midian's subject, but its creator--rolled its head over in the turmoil of flame and looked her way. This was Baphomet. This diced and divided thing. Seeing its face, she screamed. No story or movie screen, no desolation, no bliss, had prepared her for the maker of Midian. Sacred it must be, as anything so extreme must be sacred. A thing beyond things. Beyond love or hatred or their sum, beyond the beautiful or the monstrous or their sum. Beyond, finally, her mind's power to comprehend or catalog.”

CabalLoriClive BarkerMidianBaphometBoone
Book:Cabal
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“Don't bury personal obsessions. Capitalize on them. ``The connection between personal obsession and the work you do is the most important thing.'' -- Be yourself. ``Singularity is what you need.'' -- Avoid self-censorship: ``We are very self-critical in a way that can be very destructive. In our culture there are voices in our head which have taught us to say, `Oh, I wouldn't do that if I were you.' Don't ever think about anybody peering over your shoulder.'' -- Don't be afraid to show off, even if you think, ``I'm very close to making a complete fool of myself.'' -- Don't be afraid to entertain. ``I want to entertain. I don't want to lose people. I feel responsible as I write to give people the best time I can.'' -- ``Love your failures'' instead of beating yourself up over them. -- ``Learn to love the process'' of writing. -- Just do it. Barker likes something director Stanley Kubrick said: ``If you want to make a film, pick up a camera.”

WritingFacing Your Demons
Author:Clive Barker
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“So discretion was the by-word. They would take meant only when the hunger became crippling, and only then victims who were unlikely to be missed. They would refrain from infecting others, so as no to advertise their presence. if one was found, no other would risk exposure by going to his aid. Hard laws o live by, but not as hard as the consequences of breaking them. The rest was patience, and they were well used to that. Their liberator would come eventually, if they could only survive the wait. Few had any clue as to the shape he'd come in. But all knew his name. Cabal, he was called. Who Unmade Midian. Their prayers were full of him. On the next wind, let him come. If not now, then tomorrow. They might not have prayed so passionately had they known what a sea change his coming would bring. They might not have prayed at all had the know they prayed to themselves. But these were revelations for a later day. For now, they had simpler concerns. Keeping the children from the roofs at night, the bereaved from crying out too loud, the young in summer from falling in love with the human. It was a life.”

Midian
Book:Cabal
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“If we have nothing to do but service our own pleasure - because society has taught us that's all we're worth and we're exiled from positions of authority from which we could actually shape society - then we just become hedonists. Eventually, despite how great it may look on Saturday night, come Monday morning there's just purposelessness.”

IfsLooksMayNightPleasureMorningPositionTaughtShapesAuthorityDespiteSaturdayMondayTaught UsSaturday NightMonday MorningPurposelessnessHedonist
Author:Clive Barker
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