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.
CHRIS CLEAVEThis 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.
CHRIS CLEAVEAt 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.
CHRIS CLEAVEI’m not happy with just repeating myself.
CHRIS CLEAVE[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.
CHRIS CLEAVEI think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.
CHRIS CLEAVEWe leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
CHRIS CLEAVEWWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.
CHRIS CLEAVEHorror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.
CHRIS CLEAVENobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
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.
CHRIS CLEAVESad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
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.
CHRIS CLEAVEPsychiatry 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.
CHRIS CLEAVEI am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
CHRIS CLEAVEThere’s what people say, and there’s what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.
CHRIS CLEAVEWe 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