Best 19 quotes of Danzy Senna on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I think the narcolepsy is adorable. Someday you'll be happy for these little lulls. Who the fuck wants a man to be awake all the time?

I wondered if whiteness were contagious. If it were, then surely I had caught it. I imagined this “condition” affected the way I walked, talked, dressed, danced, and at its most advanced stage, the way I looked at the world and at other people.

She has decided all university campuses are alike- the sense of possibility and stasis. She thinks this too: all graduate students, if you look closely enough, exude the same aura of privilege and poverty.

When there is a gap—between your face and your race, between the baby and the mother, between your body and yourself—you are expected, everywhere you go, to explain the gap.

You know, I tried not to think of this place. I tried to let it go. To leave it behind. But it always came back to me, in my dreams. I'd dream about these details, these objects and people and places I'd left behind, and I'd wake up crying.