If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
CHRIS CLEAVEDeath, of course, is a refuge. It’s where you go when a new name, or a mask and cape, can no longer hide you from yourself. It’s where you run to when none of the principalities of your conscience will grant you asylum.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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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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[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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Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
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I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
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The 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.
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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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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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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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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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We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
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I’m really interested in people’s decisions.
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I think all of us are intrigued to imagine what we as individuals would become, if we were ever tested as hard as that golden generation was.
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To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
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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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WWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.
CHRIS CLEAVE