• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

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

Related Topics

MuchOwnSelfWriting

Popular Authors

Marilyn Monroe Paulo Coelho Abraham Lincoln C. S. Lewis Khalil Gibran Charlie Chaplin Gautama Buddha Isaac Newton

| Next

More Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes

• 

  The great thing about fiction is that I don’t have to settle on an answer to any troubling question, or even a solution.

  BONNIE JO CAMPBELL
  BrokenDecisionWriting
• 

  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
  BookHorseParty
• 

  I loved writing for the school newspaper. I liked to report and interview people, but I really liked to write columns, funny columns.

  BONNIE JO CAMPBELL
  PeopleSchoolWriting
• 

  You can’t beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.

  BONNIE JO CAMPBELL
  BeatsMarriedWriting
• 

  That was a mistake, I guess, going out to California. They have these things called guidance counselors in high school. They drink a lot of herbal tea.

  BONNIE JO CAMPBELL
  CaliforniaMistakeSchool
• 

  I’m pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.

  BONNIE JO CAMPBELL
  ChaosLifeOrderPro
• 

  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
  CountryKeysPeopleWorked
• 

  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.

  BONNIE JO CAMPBELL
  CharacterEmotionalStrong
• 

  I can’t personally drink or fight too much nowadays because I have to be perky in the morning in order to write.

  BONNIE JO CAMPBELL
  FightingMorningWriting
• 

  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.

  BONNIE JO CAMPBELL
  BestCharacterEmotionalFashionedInterestedOldWork
• 

  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
  NiceRunningTeaching
• 

  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
  ThreeTractorsTruck
• 

  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
  DadHorseKickedKidsMomOrder
• 

  The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn’t very good.

  BONNIE JO CAMPBELL
  TruthWritingYears
• 

  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.

  BONNIE JO CAMPBELL
  AdventureDistanceImportantSex
• 

  My normal writing day involves three hours of actual writing, before noon, and the rest is just feeding the writing. There is teaching (so I can afford to write), travel to be planned and executed.

  BONNIE JO CAMPBELL
  TeachingThinkingWriting