Alexandra Fuller

The only process that comes close to the process of writing a whole book, in my experience, is childbirth. There is this moment when you think you can't possibly labour for another moment, and that, paradoxically, is when you have to push hardest.

Oh, I don't keep a journal. How you remember an incident is dictated by your emotional state at the time. How you receive the information that is coming in is definitely based on your history and who you are.

I think that being raised the way I was, where everything was so uncompromising, where, you know, we're prepared to fight to the death for the soil that you believed belonged to you - that kind of extreme engagement is very difficult to flush out of your system - or your belief system, anyway.

For me, writing is really an agony. I feel as if I have a huge, luminous idea that has the potential to be really profound, and then when I set it down on paper, I find the power of the idea has been hugely weakened in the process of transmission.

There's a point at which writing a book, or a long article, begins to feel like mental labor, and it's too painful to connect in the world in any real way mid-process. The only way to survive is to write until it is all said and done.

That's the advantage of being a writer: No matter what happens, as long as you survive it, it goes into the work.

Everyone says marriage is hard work, but they don't tell you that actually being yourself and respecting yourself is hard work.

For a memoir to really succeed, the author has to do such hard work before they come to the page. They have to do a brutal self-examination of everything they believe to be true.

I don't know if it's just my age or the climate or the high altitude or some of those old-cowboy values rubbing off on me, but I've grown slightly mellower living in Wyoming. I think if you ride into the West on a high horse, you pretty soon end up in a pile of manure.