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 CAMPBELLMostly 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.
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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL -
If you have someone falling out of the boat, you’d have to drag the boat up the river and film the same scene ten times, every time, dragging the boat exactly where it was up the river.
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Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I’ve heard.
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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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I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.
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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 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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I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they’re not being written about much anymore.
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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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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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Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.
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I’m very interested in people who are in a situation that needs a little puzzling out. The thing that gets me started on a story is a person in a tough situation.
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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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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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I’m pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.
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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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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.
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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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Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL -
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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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