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

Chris Cleave

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

Armistice Ends War
At 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 CLEAVE

Enough Jingoism War
[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 CLEAVE

Children Teacher War
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Capes Names Running
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
We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Behalf Books Movies
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Dating Grandmother Men
There’s what people say, and there’s what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Differences Mean Two
I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Built Woman Wreckage
Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Alive Mean Stories
This thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Being Lovers Married
I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Fit Soul World
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
My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Ambulance Birmingham Grandmother
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

Girl Looks Stories
I’m not happy with just repeating myself.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Happy Just Not Repairing

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

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

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Popular Authors

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