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 CAMPBELLA mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you’re finished, it’s really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.
More Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes
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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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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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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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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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There are dozens of emails daily, gardening, lots of dishes (where do all these dishes come from?), daily family emergencies, and, of course, the petting of the donkeys. The smell of donkeys is heavenly, and their he-honking is the sweetest music. I feel calm just thinking about them.
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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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Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I’ve heard.
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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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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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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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It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic-love or war or a giant asteroid.
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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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Where I live you’re not supposed to shoot a firearm within a quarter mile of a dwelling.
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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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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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All those are locked up tight, of course. We have a couple of pellet guns that get more use than the real guns.
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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 always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.
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Time is never wasted coming to an old man bar.
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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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I was never a big reader as a kid. My imagination wasn’t captured by books very often. It was captured more often by boys and partying and riding horses.
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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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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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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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL