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… — Bonnie Jo Campbell Copy Share Image
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… — Bonnie Jo Campbell Copy Share Image
I'm of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe. — Bonnie Jo Campbell Copy Share 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,… — Bonnie Jo Campbell Copy Share 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,… — Bonnie Jo Campbell Copy Share Image
Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I've heard. — Bonnie Jo Campbell Copy Share Image
Any of us who listen to the news or listen to stories our neighbors tell are accustomed to violence. We have to decide then to ignore the violence and create a gentler world in our fiction, or to heighten the violence through the use of point-of-view in order to explore it and gain some insight and understanding. Since I'm living… — Bonnie Jo Campbell Copy Share
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… — Bonnie Jo Campbell Copy Share Image
My donkeys are Jack and Don Quixote. They're very smart, very cautious. Much of what people consider stubbornness in donkeys is actually cautiousness. — Bonnie Jo Campbell Copy Share Image
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,… — Bonnie Jo Campbell Copy Share
I think back when I was kind of a crappy writer, I really did know my time was better spent working and having adventures… — Bonnie Jo Campbell Copy Share Image
The great thing about fiction is that I don't have to settle on an answer to any troubling question, or even a solution. I hope that my stories serve as explorations and help show readers how and why real-life women don't always make the "correct" decisions in the face of economic and sexual troubles. We all screw up, but the… — Bonnie Jo Campbell Copy Share
