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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

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Chris Cleave
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: May 14
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Start
Talking
Story
Tellers
Cannot
Finished
Stories
Choose
Wanted
Started
Writing
Stop

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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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However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again.
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There was no quick grief for Andrew because he had been so slowly lost. First from my heart, then from my mind, and only finally from my life.
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Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
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The future looks like gasoline. . . . crude oil . . . is the future before it has been refined. It is like a dream of the future, really, and like any dream it ends with a rude awakening.
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Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
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WWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.
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I like to push characters to extremes so they have to make really tough decisions and there is no life more extreme than that of an athlete.
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We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.
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I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
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It was hard not to be full of hope
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Yet war doesn't end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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Would we be the heroes or the cowards of the piece? Would we follow orders or stick to our principles, if those two things ever conflicted? Would we be the brave ones who still found the capacity for love - and for laughter - even while we were terrified?
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Life is savagely unfair. It ignores our deep-seated convictions and places a disproportionate emphasis on the decisions we make in split seconds.
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At some point you just have to turn around and face your life head on.
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Courage is a muscle that develops through use. It's no use waiting for some inner fire to conveniently become apparent at the moment of crisis - that's cartoon stuff.
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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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I'm not happy with just repeating myself.
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Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting.
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