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.
CHRIS CLEAVEI’m really interested in people’s decisions.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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I’m really interested in people’s decisions.
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WWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.
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I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.
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Everyone carries the weight of WWII with them in their recent family history, and yet it is rarely spoken about within families, because veterans and survivors don’t tend to talk.
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There’s what people say, and there’s what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.
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Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English…?
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Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
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Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
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We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
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I’m always determined that as a novelist I’m going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.
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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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I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.
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A scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.
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A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
CHRIS CLEAVE