Quotes from Chris Cleave

There's what people say, and there's what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.

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.

We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.

That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one.

The Daily Mail can't say 'asylum-seeker' without saying 'foreign criminal' in the same sentence. I'm sure it's practically editorial policy.

I'm really interested in people's decisions.

If I can't write it would be as if I died.

In a few breaths' time I will speak some sad words to you. But you must hear them the same way we have agreed to see scars now. Sad words are just another beauty.

If your face is swollen from the severe beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man.

If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.

At some point you just have to turn around and face your life head on.

Life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs.

The ways in which we are able to express courage also depend on the hand life deals us.

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.

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.

Life is savagely unfair. It ignores our deep-seated convictions and places a disproportionate emphasis on the decisions we make in split seconds.

We don't know our hearts until life puts us to the test, and WWII fascinates because it was the last time everyone was simultaneously pushed to their limit.

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.

Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.

We're often told that we live in a globalized world, and we talk about it all the time, but people don't stop to think about what it means.

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

It's extremely hard for athletes to accept what's happened to them sometimes. It's hard to be beaten by a small margin, and I've spoken with athletes who, for years afterward, have been tormented by the knowledge that, had they done something ever so slightly different, they could have been one-ten-thousandth of a second quicker.

I'm not happy with just repeating myself.

Studying psychology is fun because you're always looking for the same things I think a writer should be looking for, which is the story behind the story.