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.
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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Even for a girl like me, then, there comes a day when she can stop surviving and start living. To survive, you have to look good or talk good. But to end your story well– here is the truth– you have to talk yourself out of it.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
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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Death, 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.
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Everyone carries the weight of WWII with them in their recent family history, and yet it is rarely spoken about within families, because veterans and survivors don’t tend to talk.
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That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one.
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I’m really interested in people’s decisions.
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To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
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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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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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We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
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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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And thus love makes fools of us all.
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I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
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Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
CHRIS CLEAVE