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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

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

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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 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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• 

  Mostly the natural landscapes work as a sounding board for my characters, so they can understand themselves, and it acts as a mirror in which we readers see ourselves.

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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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• 

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

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• 

  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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• 

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

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• 

  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.

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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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• 

  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.

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• 

  In a regular class I don’t focus on the form, but I think that focus is helpful for brainstorming and coming up with ideas quickly, especially with autobiographical material.

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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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• 

  I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they’re not being written about much anymore.

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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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