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Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

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Bonnie Jo Campbell
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 14
Novelist
Writer
Kalamazoo
Michigan
Littles
Little
Fourteen
Years
Foot
Scary
Ten
Feet
Bits
Five

More quotes by Bonnie Jo Campbell

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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.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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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.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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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. I watched the guy who tore apart the cars in the junkyard. I also wrote poems about those guys. I loved hanging around the yard.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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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.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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That's where I live, a junkyard in a neighborhood of junkyards. We have three tractors from the 1940s and '50s, several old pickup trucks, and a pile of scrap metal.
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.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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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.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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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.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work.
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.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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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.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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Mothers aren't allowed to have favorite children!
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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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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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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You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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I like to go where the life is.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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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.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.
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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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.
Bonnie Jo Campbell