Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes

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

Men didn't understand that you couldn't let yourself be consumed with passion when there were so many people needing your attention, when there was so much work to do. Men didn't understand that there was nothing big enough to exempt you from your obligations, which began as soon as the sun rose over the paper company and ended only after you'd finished the day's chores and fell exhausted into sleep against the background noise of I-94.

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

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

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

I've never shot like that in my life. That's unholy. Uncle Cal claimed credit for teaching her to shoot, but while Margo had felt his guidance, she had felt just as strongly the guidance of the gun itself. It held her steady, and then sadness perfected her aim.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Reasonableness and positivity can feel like a kind of bullying.

I love writing about men. To get by in the world you have to know how men think. Not that all guys think alike, but women tend to think about more things at the same time, an overgeneralization, but I find it easier to make my male characters focus than I do my female characters.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Time is never wasted coming to an old man bar.

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.

In fact, when I finally realized I was really going to write, when I was about thirty-four, I was working on my Ph.D. in Mathematics. I was just about to earn my Master's along the way, but I knew something was wrong because I found myself crying all the time.

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.

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.

She hoped Smoke was wrong about people being unknowable. She hoped that she could crack herself open like a nut and know herself, at least. Then she'd be able to start figuring out everybody else.

And loving a new person might even eventually dull the pain of having lost the people you have loved before, even if it didn't happen as quickly as you wanted it to. (p 99)

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.

People seem to want to read more nonfiction than fiction.

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

You're not supposed to have salt." "I'm not supposed to have cancer, either. If you don't bring me some brandy, I'm kicking you off my property.

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.

The Stark River flowed around the oxbow at Murrayville the way blood flowed through Margo Crane's heart.

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

All the men added together made the solid world
they were the marbles in the jar, and women were whatever sand or water or air claimed the space left between them. That's how I saw things as a young woman, that was my women's studies. Now I've come to know that women are like vodka poured over men, who melt away like ice cubes.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.