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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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Bonnie Jo Campbell
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 14
Novelist
Writer
Kalamazoo
Michigan
Making
Writer
Remember
Fiction
Better
Week
Things
Went
Movie
Happened
Lasts
Watched
Last
Husband

More quotes by 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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Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.
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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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 grew up with donkeys, as well as horses, but I'm more interested in donkeys.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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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.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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.
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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I wasn't writing stories with the intention of creating a particular collection. I simply wrote stories, and then discovered common themes among a good number of them.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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I'm of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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Donkeys are the most misunderstood and abused animals around the world.
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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Mothers aren't allowed to have favorite children!
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I've heard.
Bonnie Jo Campbell