Danzy Senna Quotes

• It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the same. You can’t live with it, you can’t live away from it. And it seems like from then on there’s always this yearning for some place that doesn’t exist. I felt that. Still do. I’m never completely at home anywhere.

  Danzy Senna

  Home, Thinking, Want

  Danzy Senna (2013). “From Caucasia, with Love”, p.315, A&C Black

  48 Copy quote

• I think about some of the novels I love - The Stranger, Disgrace, Quicksand and Passing, Giovanni's Room, The Talented Mr. Ripley. I think I'm more intrigued by characters who don't do the right thing and where we are allowed to identify with their shame/dishonesty/envy... whatever.

  Danzy Senna

  Character, Thinking, Envy

  Source: therumpus.net

  6 Copy quote

• I definitely feel like when I write a book it's not my job to police or guide the readers. The book and the characters don't belong to me anymore. If that makes sense.

  Danzy Senna

  Book, Character, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I'm felt I was writing about love and desire and community and belonging and grief and a whole host of other issues. But race is never far from the surface.

  Danzy Senna

  Grief, Writing, Community

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• In terms of music, each novel is different but I usually find my way into an era through the music. In this novel the New People, I listened to a lot of 90s hip-hop, which was just so genius. Also, all the musical references in the book from the Peoples Temple one and only album to Luther Vandross.

  Danzy Senna

  Book, People, Musical

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I don't like stories that are too neat and too resolved. I think resolutions can be deadening for the reader.

  Danzy Senna

  Thinking, Resolution, Neat

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I was influenced growing up by everything from Harlequin romances to Fedor Dostoyevsky and Albert Camus, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and later Lydia Davis, Mary Gaitskill, bell hooks.

  Danzy Senna

  Growing Up, Romance, Hook

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I'm not trying to be coy, but I think everyone notices these things like skin color but some people are more aware that they are noticing them than others, maybe. If that makes sense.

  Danzy Senna

  Thinking, People, Skins

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I didn't read about it for school. It was just for myself. I was interested in cults in general but Jonestown was the most interesting of all the cults I studied.

  Danzy Senna

  School, Interesting, Most Interesting

  Source: therumpus.net

  7 Copy quote

• I'm increasingly less interested in classic storylines and that arc that we have come to expect.

  Danzy Senna

  Classic

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I find myself speaking through the other characters, putting ideas in their voices and heads. Writing almost becomes a splitting of myself into multiple personalities. But I don't write to make an argument on behalf of any of the characters, or to prove anything about a character. I think that's important that I be serving the story first and not my own point of view.

  Danzy Senna

  Character, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• Writing New People I was thinking a lot about the era that I came of age - the 90's. Brooklyn, in particular, this moment when I lived there. The sense of possibility. I was also trying to find a way to write about Jonestown. I had read about it a lot and I had the sense that the story could really start to drive one over the edge.

  Danzy Senna

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I wrote the first draft of the New People quickly but it had been percolating a lot longer. It's a hard question to answer because I'd been working on another novel for years and when I gave up on that, this one came very easily. But I think the work had been going on a lot longer than the actual writing.

  Danzy Senna

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I had been really obsessed with Jonestown for a long time - many years - and had read everything there was to read about it, seen all the footage and the documentaries. I found it really chilling in a personal way - the question of people submitting all their personal power and agency and independent thought it the name of a group or ideology. I could not find a way to write about it directly that didn't feel too heavy.

  Danzy Senna

  Writing, Independent, Long

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I guess the subject of race is so natural to me I never think of it as hefty. It's something I talk about and joke about and discuss with my loved ones every day of my life.

  Danzy Senna

  Thinking, Loved Ones, Natural

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Motherhood. It was hard to get lost in anything else completely when children were 3 years old.

  Danzy Senna

  Children, Motherhood

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I think cults never stop being interesting and I'm intrigued by how we all do a tiny bit of submitting to a larger group - and how they can sneak up on you.

  Danzy Senna

  Thinking, Interesting, Cult

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• My fear was like a stray dog, roving the neighborhood of my life, looking for a new source of worry.

  Danzy Senna

  Dog, Fear, Worry

  11 Copy quote

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