"When I was eleven or twelve I wrote my first ambitious tale - that is, something a little bigger than the creative writing projects I was set at school. It was called The Wood On The Hill, and I illustrated it with my own drawings. I made no attempt to show it to a publisher because - like many artists and writers - I didn't like what I had written (and drawn) when it was finished. Still, it was a beginning."

Introduction to Clive Barker's Thief Of Always

By Clive Barker, 3 August 2001

"I wrote a novel for children called The Candle In The Cloud. It was a fantasy book, set both in the here and now and in an invented world. I did send this book off to a few publishers and one of them was interested in it. However the publisher wanted some changes made and I was about to go to university, so I put off polishing the novel until the following summer vacation. When I went back to it almost a year later, the enthusiasm I had felt for the story had withered away."

Introduction to Clive Barker's Thief Of Always,

By Clive Barker, 3 August 2001