I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they’re not being written about much anymore.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELLI’ve worked behind counters serving food, and I’ve lived on the circus train, and I’ve led bicycle tours in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and Russia. I’ve been a key liner for a newspaper, I’ve done typesetting. Oh, all sorts of things.
More Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes
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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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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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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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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 -
The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn’t very good.
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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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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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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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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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I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.
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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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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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It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic-love or war or a giant asteroid.
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Time is never wasted coming to an old man bar.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL