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 CAMPBELLIt occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic-love or war or a giant asteroid.
More Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes
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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.
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Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I’ve heard.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Time is never wasted coming to an old man bar.
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The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn’t very good.
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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.
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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.
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I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.
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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.
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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.
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My donkeys are Jack and Don Quixote. They’re very smart, very cautious. Much of what people consider stubbornness in donkeys is actually cautiousness.
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Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.
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I can’t personally drink or fight too much nowadays because I have to be perky in the morning in order to write.
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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.
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You can’t beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.
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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.
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It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic-love or war or a giant asteroid.
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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.
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I’m of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.
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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.
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The great thing about fiction is that I don’t have to settle on an answer to any troubling question, or even a solution.
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Where I live you’re not supposed to shoot a firearm within a quarter mile of a dwelling.
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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.
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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