Bonnie Jo Campbell famous quotes

05-13-2025

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.
-- Bonnie Jo Campbell

#Passion #Sleep #Men
I've worked behind counters serving food, and I've lived on the circus train, and I've led bicycle tours in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and Russia. I've been a key liner for a newspaper, I've done typesetting. Oh, all sorts of things.
-- Bonnie Jo Campbell

#Keys #Russia #Europe
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

#Mother #Husband #Gun
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.
-- Bonnie Jo Campbell

#Writing #People #Needs
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.
-- Bonnie Jo Campbell

#Writing #Character #Men
I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.
-- Bonnie Jo Campbell

#Writing #Thinking #Specificity
I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.
-- Bonnie Jo Campbell

#Adventurous #Obligation
A mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you're finished, it's really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.
-- Bonnie Jo Campbell

#Beautiful #Stories #Proof
Writing is so wrapped up in ego, but with math one is just trying to get it right, although you're often wrong. I think math helped me become a good critic of myself, come at writing a little less personally.
-- Bonnie Jo Campbell

#Writing #Math #Thinking
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.
-- Bonnie Jo Campbell

#Couple #Husband #Father
I enjoy shooting. Around where I live, it's something you do for entertainment once in a while, you go out and shoot targets.
-- Bonnie Jo Campbell

#Target #Shooting #Entertainment
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

#Love #Kings #Car
It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic-love or war or a giant asteroid. Every man wanted to be a hot-headed Bruce Willis character, fighting against the evil foreign enemy while despising the domestic bureaucracy. Men just wanted to focus on one big thing, leaving the thousands of smaller messes for the women around them to clean up.
-- Bonnie Jo Campbell

#War #Character #Fighting
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

#Sex #Distance #Adventure
Cocoa-buttered girls were stretched out on the public beach in apparently random alignments, but maybe if a weather satellite zoomed in on one of those bodies and then zoomed back out, the photos would show the curving beach itself was another woman, a fractal image made up of the particulate sunbathers. All the beaches pressed together might form female landmasses, female continents, female planets and galaxies. No wonder men felt tense.
-- Bonnie Jo Campbell

#Girl #Beach #Men
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.
-- Bonnie Jo Campbell

#Mom #Horse #Dad

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