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Life & Wisdom Quote by Clive Barker

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

About this Quote

There is a polite defiance baked into Barker's phrasing: not "innovate", not "challenge the form", but "deliver" - a verb from the world of contracts and audiences, not muses. He frames filmmaking as a kind of repeatable shipment: if a certain fear, wonder, or erotic charge has hit him before, he wants to package that sensation so it can hit again, for him and for you. In a culture that prizes novelty as virtue, Barker is admitting something closer to craft than inspiration: he is iterating.

The subtext is autobiographical. Barker's work has always been about return trips - to the body, to taboo, to the threshold where horror becomes fantasy and desire becomes dangerous. "Worked for me more than once" suggests a private testing ground: he is not chasing trends, he's chasing a reliable internal reaction. That line quietly rejects the idea that art must be a one-time breakthrough. It can be a ritual. It can be a rerun with higher stakes.

Context matters: Barker is a writer who crossed into cinema carrying a distinct sensibility, and film is the medium where personal taste collides with budgets, studios, and fan expectation. So "deliver" also reads as a survival tactic. He's signaling to gatekeepers and audiences alike: I'm not here to reinvent myself every time; I'm here to reproduce the kind of movie that reliably opens the same door in the psyche. The confidence is almost clinical, but the ambition is emotional - to make a familiar shock feel freshly intimate.

Quote Details

TopicMovie
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Barker, Clive. (2026, January 17). What I tried to do is deliver movies that have worked for me more than once. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/what-i-tried-to-do-is-deliver-movies-that-have-73902/

Chicago Style
Barker, Clive. "What I tried to do is deliver movies that have worked for me more than once." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/what-i-tried-to-do-is-deliver-movies-that-have-73902/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"What I tried to do is deliver movies that have worked for me more than once." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/what-i-tried-to-do-is-deliver-movies-that-have-73902/. Accessed 24 Mar. 2026.

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Delivering Movies That Work: Clive Barker's Creative Vision
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About the Author

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Clive Barker (born October 5, 1952) is a Writer from England.

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