Clive Barker

Writing about the unholy is one way of writing about what is sacred.

Perhaps a wiser eye than hers would be able to read tomorrow in tonight's stars, but where was the fun in that? It was better not to know. Better to be alive in the Here and the Now--in this bright, laughing moment--and let the Hours to come take care of themselves.

I can certainly throw out some observation about the process of creating which may be of use. Firstly, it's the best & the worst of worlds, because the only fuel you have to make the fire blaze on the page / screen is the stuff of your own being. An artist consumes his or herself in the act of making art. I can feel that consumption even now, sitting here at my desk at the end of a working day. In order to generate the ideas that I have set on the page for the last 10 or 11 hours I have burned the fuel of my own history. This is, obviously a double-edged sword. In order to give, the artist must take from himself. That's the deal. And it's very important to me that the work I do is the best I can make it, because I know what is being burned up to create. As the villain of Sacrament says: "living & dying, we feed the fire.

I was a weird little kid. I was very irritable, bored, frustrated. I felt my imagination bubbling inside my head without having any way to express itself. Given a crayon and paper, I would not draw a train or a house. I would draw these monsters, beasts and demons.

I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories. This is a gift from God, who spoke our species into being, but left the end of our story untold. That mystery is troubling to us. How could it be otherwise? Without the final part, we think, how are we to make sense of all that went before: which is to say, our lives?So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.

We__e making strange fictions of strange things inside ourselves.

Nothing else wounds so deeply and irreparably. Nothing else robs us of hope so much as being unloved by one we love

The great grey beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.

Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

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.

That's half of your trouble," muttered the crocodile. "You believe everything's true.""That's because everything is," replied Mr. Bacchus.

There are things that are more important than the news and what__ happening today. There are these archetypes which are part of the human imagination since humans were presumably imaginative. And I think that__ what [people] find touching, these eternal ideas. It__ one of the things that makes fantasy something that tends to stand the test of time because we__e reading, 50 years later, The Lord of the Rings.

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

I know many a strong man undone by marriage.

The pain, I can assure you, will be exquisite.

Sometimes nature is even crueller than politics.

In my ArtI have butone fear:that we willfail to befearless.

Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.