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 CAMPBELLThere 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.
More Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes
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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.
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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 always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.
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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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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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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 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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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’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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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.
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We all screw up, but the women I write about don’t have back-up plans or money in the back or resources to fix what they have broken.
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I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.
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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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I was just about to earn my Master’s along the way, but I knew something was wrong because I found myself crying all the time.
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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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL