About Chris Cleave: Chris Cleave is a British writer and journalist.
On the girl’s brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a s...
We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
There are countries of the world, and regions of one's own mind, where it is unwise to travel.
Putting down the power right from the whistle would be ugly and brutal, but it would get the job done. He wanted to tell her that, but this was the thing with coaching: you had to step back at exactly the moment you ached to step forward.
When death comes you do not stay for one minute in the place it has visited. Many things arrive after death-sadness, questions, and policemen- and none of these can be answered when your papers are not in order.
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.
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...
My whole life is my work.
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.
If I can't write it would be as if I died.
I'm not happy with just repeating myself.
I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn't the most athletic guy at school.
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 a much better writer for being a father.
This thing with being lovers, it isn't like being married.
I'm really interested in people's decisions.
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.
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.
There's what people say, and there's what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.
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.
