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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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You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.
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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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Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I've heard.
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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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The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work.
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.
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I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.
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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 grew up with donkeys, as well as horses, but I'm more interested in donkeys.
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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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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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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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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 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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Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.
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.
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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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Where I live you're not supposed to shoot a firearm within a quarter mile of a dwelling.
Bonnie Jo Campbell