CHRIS CLEAVE

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.

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

I'm not happy with just repeating myself.

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 a much better writer for being a father.

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.

My whole life is my work.

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

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.

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

This thing with being lovers, it isn't like being married.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.

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

Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.

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.

[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.

I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.

Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting.

Everyone carries the weight of WWII with them in their recent family history, and yet it is rarely spoken about within families, because veterans and survivors don't tend to talk.

What is an adventure? That depends on where you are starting from. Little girls in your country, they hide in the gap between the washing machine and the refrigerator and they make believe they are in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around them. Me and my sister, we used to hide in a gap in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around us, and make believe that we had a washing machine and a refrigerator. You live in a world of machines and you dream off things with beating hearts. We dream of machines, because we see where beating hearts have left us.