WWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.
CHRIS CLEAVEThe 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.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
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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.
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We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
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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.
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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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Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
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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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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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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
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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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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 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.
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I’m a much better writer for being a father.
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If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
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Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
CHRIS CLEAVE