I’m really interested in people’s decisions.
CHRIS CLEAVEI 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”.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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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 -
I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
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 -
I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
CHRIS CLEAVE -
I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English…?
CHRIS CLEAVE -
Sometimes we don’t notice that someone is being brave, because they are only doing something that seems quite easy for us.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
I’m not happy with just repeating myself.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
CHRIS CLEAVE