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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
Skills
Especially
America
Nonetheless
Wells
Millennium
Well
Lots
Writing
Realized
Survival
Folks

More quotes by Bonnie Jo Campbell

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I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.
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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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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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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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Donkeys are the most misunderstood and abused animals around the world.
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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.
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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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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 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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I grew up with donkeys, as well as horses, but I'm more interested in donkeys.
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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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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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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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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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
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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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Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I've heard.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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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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Mothers aren't allowed to have favorite children!
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