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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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Bonnie Jo Campbell
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 14
Novelist
Writer
Kalamazoo
Michigan
Writing
Realized
Survival
Folks
Skills
Especially
America
Nonetheless
Wells
Millennium
Well
Lots

More quotes by 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.
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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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I'm of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.
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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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The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work.
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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.
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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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Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I've heard.
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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.
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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'm pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.
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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 by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.
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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 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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Mothers aren't allowed to have favorite children!
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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.
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Donkeys are the most misunderstood and abused animals around the world.
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I like to go where the life is.
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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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