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.
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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I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL -
Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I’ve heard.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL -
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.
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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL -
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 -
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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL -
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 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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL -
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 -
Any of us who listen to the news or listen to stories our neighbors tell are accustomed to violence.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL -
I’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.
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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL -
All those are locked up tight, of course. We have a couple of pellet guns that get more use than the real guns.
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’m of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL