Alexandra Fuller

“I love my mother so much, because I see the whole of her.”

“I always knew mum loved me - tough, look-after-yourself love, as if she knew she wouldn't always be there.”

“I think for writers, I think it's really important to court eviction from your tribe: to expose things and to wake people up. And so I think that that can feel like a violation to the people you love the most.”

“I think there's a big difference between loving someone out of duty and dependency and loving someone because you really are able to sort of grow and be whole in the context of that relationship.”

“There is no way to order chaos. It's the fundamental theory at the beginning and end of everything; it's the ultimate law of nature. There's no way to win against unpredictability, to suit up completely against accidents.”

“I'm a working writer; this is my job. So it matters to me that it's good. I sweat over every word. I don't just vomit this stuff up. It's agony. The only thing that comes close is childbirth, except it's like being in labor for eighteen months.”

“In the West, it was believed that attitude and ambition saved you. In Africa, we had learned that no one was immune to capricious tragedy.”

“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.”

“What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us.”

“Being a white southern African who saw the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, the sense of being an outsider was absolutely instilled in my limbic system.”

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

“There is a myth that writers get to choose their stories. You don't get to choose your story any more than you get to choose your children. You can make the decision to write, but beyond that, at the end of the day, it's going to come out how it's going to come out.”

“I have heard over and over again that the drilling business is a dangerous business, and death is an expected part of the game, but I've also heard of the way that safety violations, human and environmental laws, and a concern for the local culture are flaunted in pursuit of money.”

“In ways I don't entirely have the words for, an experience, thought or a lesson isn't real for me until I've written down.”

“I grew up in southern Africa but was born in England, so my family was afflicted with the stiff upper lip of the British. When coupled with the violence we saw as children, that can be a fatal combination. Fortunately, I have an outlet for trauma in my writing.”

“I look around and pay attention to what around me is not being talked about, and then I talk about it with as much humour and honesty as I can. All my books have been that way.”

“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.”

“I remember Karoi as a very hot, flat place, but in reality, it is all hills. We just lived next to an airstrip - the only flat piece of land around. That was my world as a three-year-old and sums up the indelible power of memory to a young child.”

“It was a land of almost breathtaking beauty or of savage poverty; a land of screaming ghosts or of sun-flung possibilities; a land of inviting warmth or of desperate drought. How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or living in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.”

“Being a writer but also having been raised the way I was, I tend to turn to books for answers.”