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 CAMPBELLI thought that you had to learn to write by yourself and if you couldn’t do it, then you were out of luck.
More Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes
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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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL -
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 -
I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.
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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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL -
The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn’t very good.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL -
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 -
I’m pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL -
I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL -
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 -
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 -
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.
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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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL -
That’s where I live, a junkyard in a neighborhood of junkyards. We have three tractors from the 1940s and ’50s, several old pickup trucks, and a pile of scrap metal.
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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.
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It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic-love or war or a giant asteroid.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL