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 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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Men didn’t understand that you couldn’t let yourself be consumed with passion when there were so many people needing your attention, when there was so much work to do.
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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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I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.
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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.
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Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I’ve heard.
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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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The natural world is the place into which all my characters have to situate themselves in order to be who they really are, and that makes my rural fiction feel different from a lot of urban fiction.
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I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they’re not being written about much anymore.
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The great thing about fiction is that I don’t have to settle on an answer to any troubling question, or even a solution.
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I’m pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.
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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.
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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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I figure that I’m always going to be fine, one way or another, but I do worry about other people who have difficulty moving from one world to the next. It’s the folks who are truly invested in their lives who have the hardest time with change.
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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 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