Top 33 Clive Barker Quotes

My grandfather was a ship’s cook, and he came back from the Far East very often with strange little toys. One of the things he brought back was a puzzle box, which obsessed me for a long time.

I’m a great dog fanatic. My own dog died a little while ago and I take it very personally when things die – it’s a major offence.

I’ve got deeper journeys to take. Metaphysical journeys. Journeys to see Christ. Shaman journeys. It’s what I’ve been elected by God to do.

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.

Books should make somebody look at how they feel, be honest with themselves.

Nobody cares for the product I, and a host of other horror directors, make.

If there was a horror movie showing somewhere in Liverpool between 1967 and 1975, I saw it.

I’m not the expert on the great gameplay. I come in for the character design, monsters, atmosphere. I’m not the technician.

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.

The thought of making a movie in which the monsters were the good guys was just financial suicide.

I don’t take accusations of selling out lightly.

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.

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

I have a vision of the world as being a lot darker, perhaps, than I did when I was 31 and wrote the ‘Books of Blood’.

Be regular and orderly in your life, that you may be violent and original in your work.

I remember when I watched ‘Hellraiser’ with my mother. She cried when she saw my name in the opening credits, and I had to tell her that that was the happiest she was going to be for the next two hours.

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.

When I was looking for financing while making ‘Hellraiser,’ I wish there was a studio like Project Greenlight Digital Studios behind me.

What I tried to do is deliver movies that have worked for me more than once.

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.

My imagination is my polestar; I steer by that.

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.

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.

I used to think that you’d open the door, and there was Narnia. Increasingly, I think it’s all around us.

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.

Interestingly, although the ‘Books of Blood’ were greeted with cries of righteous horror – and smirks – I didn’t think of them as being particularly excessive. God knows what I did think was excessive at the time, but I didn’t think they were.

I was always aware of the ticking clock of time, always. I was very aware that I had a lot to do, and I wanted to do those things in the best possible way that I could and probably the biggest way I possibly could.

‘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.

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

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.

There’s a lot of art and comics and movies being paid homage to by game designers.

I certainly knew from an early age… how to tell stories; how to create pictures in other people’s heads.

I wanted to fold into the ‘Hellraiser’ narrative something about the guy – the Frenchman Lemarchand – who made the mysterious box, which raises Pinhead. I figured, ‘Well, what would have happened to him?’ He might well have been taken to Devil’s Island, and I thought that would be a pretty cool place to start the movie.