Latest Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Writing, Understanding, Brain

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Teaching, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• The great thing about fiction is that I don't have to settle on an answer to any troubling question, or even a solution. I hope that my stories serve as explorations and help show readers how and why real-life women don't always make the "correct" decisions in the face of economic and sexual troubles. We all screw up, but the women I write about don't have back-up plans or money in the back or resources to fix what they have broken.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Writing, Broken, Decision

  Source: therumpus.net

• Mothers aren't allowed to have favorite children!

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Mother, Children

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Character, Different, World

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Strong, Character, Emotional

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

• 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.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Humility, People, Speak

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

• 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.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Writing, Animal, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

• 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

• 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

• I'm not much interested in my own self when I write. I'm interested in what I observe out there, what's going on around me.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Writing, Self, My Own

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

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

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Morning, Writing, Fighting

  Source: therumpus.net

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

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Country, Drinking, Class

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Writing, Skills, America

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

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

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  People, Bars, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

• I like to go where the life is.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Life Is

  Source: therumpus.net

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

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Order, Pro Life, Chaos

  Source: therumpus.net

• I was never a big reader as a kid. My imagination wasn't captured by books very often. It was captured more often by boys and partying and riding horses.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Horse, Party, Book

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Thinking, Class, Ideas

  Source: therumpus.net

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

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Novel, Heard, Percent

  Source: therumpus.net