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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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Chris Cleave
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: May 14
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
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More quotes by Chris Cleave
I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
Chris Cleave
I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn't the most athletic guy at school.
Chris Cleave
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
I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope.
Chris Cleave
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
The 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.
Chris Cleave
And thus love makes fools of us all.
Chris Cleave
If your face is swollen from the severe beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man.
Chris Cleave
Still shaking, in the pew, I understood that it isn't the dead we cry for. We cry for ourselves, and I didn't deserve my own pity.
Chris Cleave
Life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs.
Chris Cleave
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.
Chris Cleave
I think that the relationship between two top-level athletes who are rivals is one of the most fascinating human relationships to explore. It's always one atom away from being a tragedy.
Chris Cleave
The ways in which we are able to express courage also depend on the hand life deals us.
Chris Cleave
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
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
[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
I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
Chris Cleave
Our stories are the tellers of us.
Chris Cleave
This is the forked tongue of grief again. It whispers in one ear: return to what you once loved best, and in the other ear it whispers, move on.
Chris Cleave
Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting.
Chris Cleave
