Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes

Donkeys are the most misunderstood and abused animals around the world.

I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.

I worked probably fewer jobs than most people, or fewer real soul-killing jobs than other people. I've been a typist, a typesetter, a keyliner, cappuccino-maker. I think I've been pretty lucky.

My donkeys are Jack and Don Quixote. They're very smart, very cautious. Much of what people consider stubbornness in donkeys is actually cautiousness.

As a writer, I can live somewhat independently, occupying nooks and crannies and finding meaning there. I can even live in my mind a good portion of most days.

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.

A mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you're finished, it's really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.

I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.

Where I live you're not supposed to shoot a firearm within a quarter mile of a dwelling.

I grew up with donkeys, as well as horses, but I'm more interested in donkeys.

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.

I didn't actually figure out how to get guidance, so I just decided to go to school at University of Southern California because they sent me a glossy brochure.

That was a mistake, I guess, going out to California. They have these things called guidance counselors in high school. They drink a lot of herbal tea.

There were a lot of beautiful, thin people out there driving nice cars. It was a whole different experience being in L.A.

After a year, it was great to get out of L.A. and return to Hyde Park. Since my grandparents lived in Hyde Park, I had been coming there since I was a tyke.

I was unhappy and I couldn't figure out what was the matter. And he told me to go take a writing course. And I didn't even know that one could learn to write in writing courses.

Mothers aren't allowed to have favorite children!

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.

You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.

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.

The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work.

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.

Weirdly the writing experience has not really changed that much except it used to be that I was busy because I had to work a couple of jobs to earn money, so I didn't have time to write.

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.

Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.

I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.

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.

I enjoy shooting. Around where I live, it's something you do for entertainment once in a while, you go out and shoot targets.

People seem to want to read more nonfiction than fiction.

Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I've heard.

I was never a big reader as a kid. My imagination wasn't captured by books very often. It was captured more often by boys and partying and riding horses.

In a regular class I don't focus on the form, but I think that focus is helpful for brainstorming and coming up with ideas quickly, especially with autobiographical material.

I'm pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.

I'm of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.

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.

I thought that you had to learn to write by yourself and if you couldn't do it, then you were out of luck.

Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor.

I can't personally drink or fight too much nowadays because I have to be perky in the morning in order to write.

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.

Time is never wasted coming to an old man bar.

I like to go where the life is.

I loved writing for the school newspaper. I liked to report and interview people, but I really liked to write columns, funny columns.

The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn't very good.