I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELLI 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.
More Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes
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I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL -
A mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you’re finished, it’s really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.
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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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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’m of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.
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Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.
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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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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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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 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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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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My donkeys are Jack and Don Quixote. They’re very smart, very cautious. Much of what people consider stubbornness in donkeys is actually cautiousness.
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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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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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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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL