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…?
CHRIS CLEAVEI’m always determined that as a novelist I’m going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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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.
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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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Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
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I write in the novel’s afterword that our recent wars “finish not with victory or defeat but with a calendar draw-down date and a presumption that we shall never be reconciled with the enemy”.
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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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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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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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I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
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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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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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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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I’m really interested in people’s decisions.
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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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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’m a much better writer for being a father.
CHRIS CLEAVE