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

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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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 think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.
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Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.
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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 have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.
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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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I grew up with donkeys, as well as horses, but I'm more interested in donkeys.
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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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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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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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I like to go where the life is.
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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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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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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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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You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.
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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.
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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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Mothers aren't allowed to have favorite children!
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