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.
CHRIS CLEAVEI planned how I would kill myself in the time of Churchill (stand under bombs), Victoria (throw myself under a horse), and Henry the Eighth (marry Henry the Eighth)- Little Bee
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
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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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The reason why I love people, and writing about them, is because they don’t always respond with hate and anger. If they did I wouldn’t have a story to tell. Who wants to know about someone who was brutalised and became brutal? I’m interested in the exceptions.
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Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.
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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 think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
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We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
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I’m not happy with just repeating myself.
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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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A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
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This thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
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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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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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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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Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.
CHRIS CLEAVE