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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

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More Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes

• 

  That’s why I have to be a fiction writer, because I can’t remember what just happened or where I went last week or what movie I just watched with my husband. I’m better off just making things up.

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• 

  I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.

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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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• 

  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.

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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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• 

  After a year, it was great to get out of L.A. and return to Hyde Park. Since my grandparents lived in Hyde Park, I had been coming there since I was a tyke.

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• 

  Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.

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• 

  Any of us who listen to the news or listen to stories our neighbors tell are accustomed to violence.

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• 

  I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.

  BONNIE JO CAMPBELL
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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.

  BONNIE JO CAMPBELL
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• 

  I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.

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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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• 

  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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• 

  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 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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