Quotes from Bonnie Jo Campbell

I've got a head full of stories you still need to hear, starting with my ribs, ending with my whole life.

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.

reasonableness and positivity can feel like a kind of bullying.

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.

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.

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

People seem to want to read more nonfiction than fiction.

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.

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

I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.

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.