A mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you’re finished, it’s really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELLI 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.
More Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes
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Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I’ve heard.
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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 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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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.
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There 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.
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I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.
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Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor.
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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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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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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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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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I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.
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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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I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they’re not being written about much anymore.
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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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL