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So when I say that I am a refugee, you must understand that there is no refuge.

Chris Cleave

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Chris Cleave
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: May 14
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Refugee
Refuge
Understand
Must

More quotes by Chris Cleave

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Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
Chris Cleave
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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.
Chris Cleave
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I think the recent cluster of WWII novels is so good because we have reached an optimal distance from the war. Just as a lens has its focal length, the novel also has its best distance from the action.
Chris Cleave
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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.
Chris Cleave
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You travel here and you travel there, trying to get out from under the cloud, and nothing works, and then one day you realize you've been carrying the weather around with you.
Chris Cleave
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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.
Chris Cleave
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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
Chris Cleave
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My whole life is my work.
Chris Cleave
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If your face is swollen from the severe beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man.
Chris Cleave
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People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy.
Chris Cleave
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I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
Chris Cleave
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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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WWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.
Chris Cleave
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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.
Chris Cleave
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The Daily Mail can't say 'asylum-seeker' without saying 'foreign criminal' in the same sentence. I'm sure it's practically editorial policy.
Chris Cleave
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I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn't the most athletic guy at school.
Chris Cleave
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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
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And thus love makes fools of us all.
Chris Cleave
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Something I am now convinced of, after researching Everyone Brave, is that none of us is born courageous in all respects.
Chris Cleave
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I think that there's something extremely beautiful about the Olympic ideal and its motto - 'Swifter, higher, stronger' - it's such a beautiful motto, and it celebrates everything which is the antithesis of death and dissolution and entropy.
Chris Cleave