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.

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.

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.

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.

My life is in the art that I make, and I'm very happy with it.

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 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'.

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.

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.

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.

Some people think that horror films are some sort of second class filmmaking, and the only way to bypass that thinking is being proud of the fact that we do it.

Though I respect hugely the effort and the care and the beauty of games, I want to be working with people who want to create the 'War & Peace' of games, the 'Citizen Kane' of games, and not just be warming up George Romero.