Hi, Darcey
If you are putting a literal value into the clipboard through VA's 'Set value to Windows Clipboard' action, your curly brackets are being treated as part of a token. That is, whatever is between your brackets is being parsed through the token processor. To use literal curly brackets in places that accept tokens in VA, simply replace your curly brackets with this: '|{' and '|}' and you should be good to go :
if (xxx == xxxx)|{
|}
See the, 'Text (and Text-To-Speech) Tokens' inside of VA's help documentation (somewhere around page 129).
Hope that helps!