Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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!).

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Clever, Survival, World

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Writing, People, Needs

  7 Copy quote

• Time is never wasted coming to an old man bar.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Men, Bars, Old Man

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I wasn't writing stories with the intention of creating a particular collection. I simply wrote stories, and then discovered common themes among a good number of them.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Writing, Creating, Numbers

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Mind, Portions, Findings

  Source: therumpus.net

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Moving, People, Worry

  Source: therumpus.net

  7 Copy quote

• Some people tell me they would be afraid of my characters, but I tell those people [that] they meet these characters all the time. They just don't care about them when they meet them, at the gas station, the car wash, the post office even.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Character, People, Car

  Source: therumpus.net

  7 Copy quote

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

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Novel, Heard, Percent

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Writing, Thinking, Specificity

  19 Copy quote

• Men didn't understand that you couldn't let yourself be consumed with passion when there were so many people needing your attention, when there was so much work to do. Men didn't understand that there was nothing big enough to exempt you from your obligations, which began as soon as the sun rose over the paper company and ended only after you'd finished the day's chores and fell exhausted into sleep against the background noise of I-94.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Passion, Sleep, Men

  Bonnie Jo Campbell (2009). “American Salvage: Stories”, p.35, Wayne State University Press

  8 Copy quote

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

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Beautiful, Stories, Proof

  7 Copy quote

• People seem to want to read more nonfiction than fiction.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  People, Fiction, Want

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Character, Writing, Men

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Mom, Horse, Dad

  4 Copy quote

• I've worked behind counters serving food, and I've lived on the circus train, and I've led bicycle tours in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and Russia. I've been a key liner for a newspaper, I've done typesetting. Oh, all sorts of things.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Keys, Russia, Europe

  6 Copy quote

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

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Hard Work, Writing, Lessons

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic-love or war or a giant asteroid. Every man wanted to be a hot-headed Bruce Willis character, fighting against the evil foreign enemy while despising the domestic bureaucracy. Men just wanted to focus on one big thing, leaving the thousands of smaller messes for the women around them to clean up.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  War, Character, Fighting

  4 Copy quote

• A Life in Men is a joyful, ambitious novel that is also an adventure traversing three continents, as well as a meditation on love, sex, and, most important, friendship, which can overcome time, distance, and even death.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Sex, Distance, Adventure

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Girl, Beach, Men

  Bonnie Jo Campbell (2009). “American Salvage: Stories”, p.131, Wayne State University Press

  4 Copy quote

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

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Writing, Married, Beats

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Writing, Math, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

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

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Target, Shooting, Entertainment

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Mother, Husband, Gun

  4 Copy quote

• We have a shotgun we inherited from my father-in-law, a paranoid Englishman living in Texas. I have a .22 Marlin rifle, similar to the one Annie Oakley had, and my husband has a .357 Magnum pistol. All those are locked up tight, of course. We have a couple of pellet guns that get more use than the real guns.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Husband, Couple, Father

  17 Copy quote

• I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Adventurous, Obligation, Felt

  4 Copy quote

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