Clive Barker Quotes

I suppose I'm trying to build an architecture that's as timeless as possible, although we're all creatures of our age.

Comedy ages quicker than tragedy, to the extent that we can't know if the 10 commandments may originally have been 10 hilarious one-liners.

It is a hopeless endeavor to make the form and content of earlier architectural epochs usable for our time; in this, even the strongest artistic talent must fail. We see repeatedly how the outstanding builders fail to achieve an effect because their work does not serve the will of the age.

Like the seasons of the year, like history, truth also repeats itself. But we seldom recognize it when great poets or true artists - the prophets and the priests of our day - present it to us in garments spick and span, following the fashion of the age, the slant of its fancy, the turn and temper of its mind.

I strive to use references that may still make some kind of sense once our age has passed into history. That robs my writing of a certain connectedness to my time, but potentially might allow it to make sense to people who are not in this time.

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun.

his voice was centuries old

Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.

The world always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us.

A poet must need be before his own age, to be even with posterity

You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!

History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning ofthings, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,--when did burdock and plantain sprout first?

I was dreaming ... about my grandfather. A very old man, at least as old as I am now, 91. I thought, when I was a boy, that he had been 91 all his life. Now I feel as if I have been 91 all my life.

Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time.

Authors, like coins, grow dear as they grow old.

Wherever there is power, there is age. Don't be deceived by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe is a thousand years old.

Benaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together!

Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world's willingness to receive it--indeed the world's need of it--these never pass.

Every age has its pleasures, its style of wit, and its own ways.

One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.

A story can be new and yet tell about olden times. The past comes into existence with the story.

As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age.

All would live long, but none would be old.

Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.