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

Bonnie Jo Campbell

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Bonnie Jo Campbell
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 14
Novelist
Writer
Kalamazoo
Michigan
Universal
Place
Great
Writing
Make
Think
Thinking
Specificity
Manage

More quotes by Bonnie Jo Campbell

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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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Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.
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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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Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I've heard.
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I think back when I was kind of a crappy writer, I really did know my time was better spent working and having adventures and seeing the world.
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Mothers aren't allowed to have favorite children!
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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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When I was little, we lived on 8 acres and my mom had a horse. But when I was 7, my mom kicked my dad out, and then in order to feed us five kids, she got critters cheap or for free and raised them for food. We milked a cow, raised chickens, pigs and beef cattle. We heated our one-story house with wood and stayed cold all winter.
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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 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'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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I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.
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Maybe the hardest lesson is the one I have to learn over and over again, that each story is its own animal, that every story I write is going to come only with difficulty.
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I like to go where the life is.
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Nobody tells young writers it's okay if you're not very good, you'll get better. So I just thought I'm not very good, so I should try to do every other thing besides writing. That's how I ended up being a hitchhiker, a world traveler, and a mathematician.
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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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I grew up with donkeys, as well as horses, but I'm more interested in donkeys.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they're not being written about much anymore. 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.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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Donkeys are the most misunderstood and abused animals around the world.
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The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work.
Bonnie Jo Campbell