Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
CHRIS CLEAVEThe only bad days as a writer are the ones when you are too cowardly or too lazy to sit down at the keyboard and give it everything you have.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one.
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I’m a much better writer for being a father.
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I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
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We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
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To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
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I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.
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[My maternal grandmother ] was a teacher in London and elsewhere during the war, although the children she taught were not the “lost children” who feature in the novel – those come from my research.
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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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At this point in time the war [ WWII] is close enough to still feel hotly personal to a writer, yet far enough away so that jingoism and heroics are no longer required.
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This is the forked tongue of grief again. It whispers in one ear: return to what you once loved best, and in the other ear it whispers, move on.
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Psychiatry in this place is like serving an in-flight meal in the middle of a plane crash. If I wanted to make you well, as a doctor, I should be giving you a parachute, not a cheese-and-pickle sandwich.
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Sometimes we don’t notice that someone is being brave, because they are only doing something that seems quite easy for us.
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Even for a girl like me, then, there comes a day when she can stop surviving and start living. To survive, you have to look good or talk good. But to end your story well– here is the truth– you have to talk yourself out of it.
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Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.
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I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
CHRIS CLEAVE