black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

There’s what people say, and there’s what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.

Chris Cleave

We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Reality Refugee Summer
If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Chasing Destroy Died Writing
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Bad Day Giving Lazy
I’m a much better writer for being a father.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Being Better Father Much
WWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Events Memories Wwii
I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Guy School Thinking
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Survivor Veteran Weight
Sometimes we don’t notice that someone is being brave, because they are only doing something that seems quite easy for us.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Brave Easy Sometimes
We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Behalf Books Movies
Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Armistice Ends War
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 CLEAVE

Enemy War Writing
Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
CHRIS CLEAVE

Alive Mean Stories
I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Bravery Mean Thinking
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Dying Mean Thinking
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
CHRIS CLEAVE

Bombs Horse Littles
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Hope Missing Without Young

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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There’s what people say, and there’s what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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