Clive Barker Quotes

I will concede to you one thing - 'Hustler' is offensive, even to the point of being iconoclastic. That's our purpose - to be offensive.

There are characters in [punk] that do deliberately go as far as they can in certain kind of taboo areas.

We tried to make a movie that had sex and violence because we like sex and violence.

I like to provoke. I'm very French.

When you buy my books, you kind of know what you're in for. It's kind of self-selecting. If you have a delicate sensibility, and you're easily grossed out, you probably will never read one of my books.

I never deliberately set out to shock, but when people don't walk out of my plays I think there is something wrong.

Any actor is happy to be involved with something that's challenging, controversial, and not easily palatable. Things that are too dumbed down or easy to swallow are uninteresting... It's good when people have such a polarizing response.

When I was in advertising we used naked women to pull them in. Now I use swastikas and uniforms.

When I was in advertising we used to pull them in with naked women. Now I do it with swastikas and uniforms.

You cannot hurt animals, so what do I do? I kill the dog first. Then I do it with the boy. You're not supposed to break the illusion of this being a film, so I make the actor talk to the audience. Provocation is the principle of the whole film [ Funny Games]. It is very ironic.

To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about. If someone vomits while watching one of my films, it's like getting a standing ovation. But one must remember that there is such a thing as good bad taste and bad bad taste.

There's nowhere I won't go. As long as it's horribly, horribly true and/or wrong.

The bar for being shocking doesn't even exist anymore. What am I going to do to shock people? Seriously, try to get The Fisting Musical off the ground? Its really at this point, there is no bar.

I did large drawings of couples having sex! Men and woman enjoying intercourse and oral sex in a Madison Avenue Gallery? That was the first time I broke a barrier that made me think, some idiot is going to blow my brains out for sure.

I use really crazy subject matter, like all of those pictures of me throwing up and cutting myself, it's to make people think rather than be so mediocre. Instead of just seeing another girl with implants, I want to have meaning to what I do.

There's always a polemic in my clothes.

Hopefully people are upset for the reason I want them to be upset. Even when I was doing open mics, I've always had people upset. I've never been the consummate crowd-pleaser.

The immoderate cannot laugh moderately.

I'm the foe of moderation, the champion of excess.

They are sick that surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing.

If I had a kid, I'd give him a name that would make everyone would want to say his name. I'd call him, Pizza-Pussy-Santa. I would! Cause everybody likes one of those things.

Everything was meant to wind people up [in Make It Big ]. I don't know why we had this great pleasure in winding people up, but we really did think they would get the joke. And it backfired on us.

I've realized there are far more efficient and devastating methods of disturbing people than merely sloshing around in the pigpen with obvious, profane, scatological, flat-brained, grade-school offensiveness.

I wanna get on TV and just let loose. But can't, but it's cool for Tom Green to hump a dead moose.

Extremes are for us as if they were not, and as if we were not in regard to them; they escape from us, or we from them.