Quote

I read stories aloud at every stage. I listen to my writer friends when they kindly offer criticism. I listen to my husband when he tells me something doesn't seem right. I have my mother's boyfriend, Loring Janes, read to make sure I get everything right with the machines and guns.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

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Bonnie Jo Campbell
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 14
Novelist
Writer
Kalamazoo
Michigan
Seem
Tells
Seems
Stage
Gun
Everything
Sure
Machines
Aloud
Right
Friends
Criticism
Kindly
Every
Read
Offers
Boyfriend
Something
Doesn
Husband
Jane
Make
Listen
Guns
Mother
Writer
Offer
Stories

More quotes by Bonnie Jo Campbell

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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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I like to go where the life is.
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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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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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Some people tell me they would be afraid of my characters, but I tell those people [that] they meet these characters all the time. They just don't care about them when they meet them, at the gas station, the car wash, the post office even.
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Donkeys are the most misunderstood and abused animals around the world.
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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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I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.
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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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The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work.
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Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.
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Mothers aren't allowed to have favorite children!
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I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.
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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.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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We have a shotgun we inherited from my father-in-law, a paranoid Englishman living in Texas. I have a .22 Marlin rifle, similar to the one Annie Oakley had, and my husband has a .357 Magnum pistol. 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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Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I've heard.
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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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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 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.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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A Life in Men is a joyful, ambitious novel that is also an adventure traversing three continents, as well as a meditation on love, sex, and, most important, friendship, which can overcome time, distance, and even death.
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