Chris Cleave Quotes - Page 4

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.

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.

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.

Something I am now convinced of, after researching Everyone Brave, is that none of us is born courageous in all respects.

That is the trouble with happiness-all of it is built on top of something that men want.

And thus love makes fools of us all.

I'm really interested in people's decisions.

I think all of us are intrigued to imagine what we as individuals would become, if we were ever tested as hard as that golden generation was.

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.

I'm a much better writer for being a father.

I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn't the most athletic guy at school.

When I reached Fort Binjemma, for example, where my grandfather was stationed for a while, the whole Victorian fort was decaying. Barbed wire surrounded it, spray paint on the ancient walls claimed it as private property, and the moat where my grandfather and his men had grown crops - in desperation as the siege's hunger bit - was completely overgrown with bushes and trees.

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.

I'm not happy with just repeating myself.

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 was astonished to find that the positions my grandfather had defended were now overgrown and entangled with trees and thorns. I suppose I had developed a sense of reverence for the locations he described in his memoirs and letters - the forts and the high emplacements. I had expected them to have been preserved in some way.

I wanted to look at the differences between how we fought then and how we fight now, because the current lack of closure generates a state of psychological unease that is interesting to acknowledge and examine.

Yet war doesn't end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.

It is certainly impossible to imagine forgiving the enemy while their animus remains undefeated.

I do think it is harder to acknowledge our strengths, or to forgive ourselves and each other for our shortcomings, when there has not been a result we can all agree on.

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".

My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.

I do think it is harder to acknowledge our strengths, or to forgive ourselves and each other for our shortcomings, when there has not been a result we can all agree on. And it is certainly impossible to imagine forgiving the enemy while their animus remains undefeated. Yet war doesn't end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.