We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
CHRIS CLEAVEIf I can’t write it would be as if I died.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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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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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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Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.
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This thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
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My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
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My maternal grandmother was in London during the Blitz. Indeed, the man she was dating before she met my grandfather was killed beside her in a cinema, in 1941, when a bomb came through the roof – a tragedy in which she herself was badly wounded.
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Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
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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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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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If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
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A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
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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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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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Still shaking, in the pew, I understood that it isn’t the dead we cry for. We cry for ourselves, and I didn’t deserve my own pity.
CHRIS CLEAVE