Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Bonnie Jo Campbell
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 14
Novelist
Writer
Kalamazoo
Michigan
Observe
Interested
Write
Around
Self
Writing
Going
Much

More quotes by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Image
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
Image
Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I've heard.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Image
I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Image
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
Image
Where I live you're not supposed to shoot a firearm within a quarter mile of a dwelling.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Image
Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Donkeys are the most misunderstood and abused animals around the world.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Image
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
Image
You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Image
Mothers aren't allowed to have favorite children!
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Image
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
Image
I'm of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.
Bonnie Jo Campbell