Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes

I think back when I was kind of a crappy writer, I really did know my time was better spent working and having adventures and seeing the world.

Writing is so wrapped up in ego, but with math one is just trying to get it right, although you're often wrong. I think math helped me become a good critic of myself, come at writing a little less personally.

I loved writing for the school newspaper. I liked to report and interview people, but I really liked to write columns, funny columns.

The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work.

Any of us who listen to the news or listen to stories our neighbors tell are accustomed to violence. We have to decide then to ignore the violence and create a gentler world in our fiction, or to heighten the violence through the use of point-of-view in order to explore it and gain some insight and understanding. Since I'm living with the violence and trouble in my brain, it's kind of a relief to write about it, to get it on paper, to put it in context, to find meaning in it.

My normal writing day involves three hours of actual writing, before noon, and the rest is just feeding the writing. There is teaching (so I can afford to write), travel to be planned and executed. There are dozens of emails daily, gardening, lots of dishes (where do all these dishes come from?), daily family emergencies, and, of course, the petting of the donkeys. The smell of donkeys is heavenly, and their he-honking is the sweetest music. I feel calm just thinking about them.

For 'King Cole's American Salvage,' I rode around in the wrecker with a local driver and watched him deal with customers and hook up the cars. I watched the guy who tore apart the cars in the junkyard. I also wrote poems about those guys. I loved hanging around the yard.

I like living near my family, and near the people I understand the best. The landscape of Michigan speaks to me, and the humility and humor of the people here makes sense. It just feels right to live here, in a place where I don't dare put on airs.

I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they're not being written about much anymore. I'm very interested in people who are in a situation that needs a little puzzling out. The thing that gets me started on a story is a person in a tough situation.

I do different work, teaching and running around visiting universities and bookstores, and that prevents me from writing. But it's nice to be wanted as a writer.

I grew up with donkeys, as well as horses, but I'm more interested in donkeys.

I didn't actually figure out how to get guidance, so I just decided to go to school at University of Southern California because they sent me a glossy brochure.

I love writing about men. To get by in the world you have to know how men think. Not that all guys think alike, but women tend to think about more things at the same time, an overgeneralization, but I find it easier to make my male characters focus than I do my female characters.

I enjoy shooting. Around where I live, it's something you do for entertainment once in a while, you go out and shoot targets.

Maybe the hardest lesson is the one I have to learn over and over again, that each story is its own animal, that every story I write is going to come only with difficulty.

Donkeys are the most misunderstood and abused animals around the world.

Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I've heard.

The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn't very good.

A mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you're finished, it's really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.

We know that we need to explore desire in fiction - many say that the only way a story exists is that a character feels a strong desire - and nature is the place where creatures act on their desires in the most pure way imaginable, so maybe nature also works as a metaphor for whatever emotional troubles my characters have to negotiate. I'm interested in my characters as survivors, and maybe that works best when the old-fashioned notion of humans surviving in wilderness is not too far away.

Mostly the natural landscapes work as a sounding board for my characters, so they can understand themselves, and it acts as a mirror in which we readers see ourselves. The natural world is the place into which all my characters have to situate themselves in order to be who they really are, and that makes my rural fiction feel different from a lot of urban fiction.

There were a lot of beautiful, thin people out there driving nice cars. It was a whole different experience being in L.A.

When I was little, we lived on 8 acres and my mom had a horse. But when I was 7, my mom kicked my dad out, and then in order to feed us five kids, she got critters cheap or for free and raised them for food. We milked a cow, raised chickens, pigs and beef cattle. We heated our one-story house with wood and stayed cold all winter.

I thought that you had to learn to write by yourself and if you couldn't do it, then you were out of luck.

I figure that I'm always going to be fine, one way or another, but I do worry about other people who have difficulty moving from one world to the next. It's the folks who are truly invested in their lives who have the hardest time with change.

Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.

After a year, it was great to get out of L.A. and return to Hyde Park. Since my grandparents lived in Hyde Park, I had been coming there since I was a tyke.

I was unhappy and I couldn't figure out what was the matter. And he told me to go take a writing course. And I didn't even know that one could learn to write in writing courses.

I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.

Cocoa-buttered girls were stretched out on the public beach in apparently random alignments, but maybe if a weather satellite zoomed in on one of those bodies and then zoomed back out, the photos would show the curving beach itself was another woman, a fractal image made up of the particulate sunbathers. All the beaches pressed together might form female landmasses, female continents, female planets and galaxies. No wonder men felt tense.

Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor.

I'm pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.

In fact, when I finally realized I was really going to write, when I was about thirty-four, I was working on my Ph.D. in Mathematics. I was just about to earn my Master's along the way, but I knew something was wrong because I found myself crying all the time.

I read stories aloud at every stage. I listen to my writer friends when they kindly offer criticism. I listen to my husband when he tells me something doesn't seem right. I have my mother's boyfriend, Loring Janes, read to make sure I get everything right with the machines and guns.

As a writer, I can live somewhat independently, occupying nooks and crannies and finding meaning there. I can even live in my mind a good portion of most days.

You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.

I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.

Weirdly the writing experience has not really changed that much except it used to be that I was busy because I had to work a couple of jobs to earn money, so I didn't have time to write.

Nobody tells young writers it's okay if you're not very good, you'll get better. So I just thought I'm not very good, so I should try to do every other thing besides writing. That's how I ended up being a hitchhiker, a world traveler, and a mathematician.

In a regular class I don't focus on the form, but I think that focus is helpful for brainstorming and coming up with ideas quickly, especially with autobiographical material.

I'm of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.

Time is never wasted coming to an old man bar.

I like to go where the life is.

I realized that I was writing about folks with lots of skills, especially fix-it skills and survival skills, who were nonetheless not doing well in the new-millennium America.

If you have someone falling out of the boat, you'd have to drag the boat up the river and film the same scene ten times, every time, dragging the boat exactly where it was up the river.

I love investigating the natural world, and I find a lot of truths there, truths about survival and beauty - nature continually surprises me (amazing how clever a woodchuck is, amazing how plants roots can break up concrete, amazing how delicious the thimbleberry is!).

I can't personally drink or fight too much nowadays because I have to be perky in the morning in order to write.

People seem to want to read more nonfiction than fiction.