Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELLIn 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.
More Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes
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I thought that you had to learn to write by yourself and if you couldn’t do it, then you were out of luck.
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Time is never wasted coming to an old man bar.
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A mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you’re finished, it’s really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.
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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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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.
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Any of us who listen to the news or listen to stories our neighbors tell are accustomed to violence.
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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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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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Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I’ve heard.
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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.
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I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they’re not being written about much anymore.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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