If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
CHRIS CLEAVEThe 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.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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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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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.
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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 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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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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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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I’m not happy with just repeating myself.
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I’m a much better writer for being a father.
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Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.
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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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[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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I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.
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We no longer need to show people being brave: instead, we can examine how they became brave. We can assume that they didn’t start out that way. If we allow that they started out just like us, then their journey into courage becomes both more fascinating and more impressive.
CHRIS CLEAVE






