Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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

• 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

• 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

• I worked probably fewer jobs than most people, or fewer real soul-killing jobs than other people. I've been a typist, a typesetter, a keyliner, cappuccino-maker. I think I've been pretty lucky.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Jobs, Real, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

  13 Copy quote

• My donkeys are Jack and Don Quixote. They're very smart, very cautious. Much of what people consider stubbornness in donkeys is actually cautiousness.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Smart, People, Cautiousness

  Source: therumpus.net

  9 Copy quote

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

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Horse, Donkey, Grew Up

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

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

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Writing, School, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Black, Training, Degrees

  Source: therumpus.net

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• That's why I have to be a fiction writer, because I can't remember what just happened or where I went last week or what movie I just watched with my husband. I'm better off just making things up.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Husband, Fiction, Lasts

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Running, Nice, Teaching

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Writing, Luck, Ifs

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Years, Grandparent, Hyde

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Jobs, Couple, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

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

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Country, Drinking, Class

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• Mothers aren't allowed to have favorite children!

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Mother, Children

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

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• 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

  4 Copy quote

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