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”.
CHRIS CLEAVEI think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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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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If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.
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I planned how I would kill myself in the time of Churchill (stand under bombs), Victoria (throw myself under a horse), and Henry the Eighth (marry Henry the Eighth)- Little Bee
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We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
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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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The reason why I love people, and writing about them, is because they don’t always respond with hate and anger. If they did I wouldn’t have a story to tell. Who wants to know about someone who was brutalised and became brutal? I’m interested in the exceptions.
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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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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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[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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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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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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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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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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I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.
CHRIS CLEAVE