Top 50 Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Time is never wasted coming to an old man bar.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

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

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

3. “Donkeys are the most misunderstood and abused animals around the world.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

4. “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

5. “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.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

6. “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 hitchhiker, a world traveler, and a mathematician.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

7. “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

8. “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.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

9. “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.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

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

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

11. “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

12. “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.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

13. “I’m pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

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

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

15. “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.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

16. “I grew up with donkeys, as well as horses, but I’m more interested in donkeys.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

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

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

18. “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.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

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

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

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

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

21. “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

22. “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

23. “I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

24. “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.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

25. “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.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

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

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

27. “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.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

28. “It’s hard enough to figure out how to live... without worrying about what the hell’s normal.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

29. “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.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

30. “You can’t beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

31. “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

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

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

33. “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

34. “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.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

35. “People seem to want to read more nonfiction than fiction.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

36. “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.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

37. “I figure that I’m always going to be fine, one way or another, but I do worry about other people who have difficulty moving from one world to the next. It’s the folks who are truly invested in their lives who have the hardest time with change.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

38. “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

39. “I like to go where the life is.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

40. “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

41. “Where I live you’re not supposed to shoot a firearm within a quarter mile of a dwelling.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

42. “The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn’t very good.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

43. “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.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

44. “I’m of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

45. “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.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

46. “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.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

47. “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.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

48. “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.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

49. “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.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

50. “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