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"I think it’s always true for every writer that your debut novel stands on its own, but your second novel is always seen in relation to what came before."
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Danzy SennaI wrote a pilot for a show that was based on my work. I wrote an origi — Danzy Senna
"I wrote a pilot for a show that was based on my work. I wrote an original pilot for a limited series that is still out there being shopped around. … What I felt writing scripts is, I really like it. Its very interesting and sort of technical-feeling compared to writing novels. And I will continue to do it because its a nice break between books, and it kind of can pay … to get a new stove in your kitchen, like theres actual financial benefits to doing it. But I think my soul is in the page and in writing novels. Being in control of the entire universe that Im writing is really what feeds me on a much deeper level. And so I will never kind of fully abandon the written word. It just feeds me in a whole other way, but unfortunately doesnt literally feed me or my children."
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Danzy Senna
Danzy Senna
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Danzy Senna is an American novelist and essayist. She is the author of six books and numerous essays about race, gender and American identity, including Caucasia (1998), Symptomatic (2003), New People (2017), and most recently Colored Television (2024). Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vogue, and The New York Times. She is a professor of English at the University of Southe
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"My mother had this book lying around our house in the 1980s called “The Big Book of Jewish Humor.” I remember looking through it as a kid and understanding that Jewish people had their own inside jokes, and this fact alone somehow made me feel that Jewish people were their own club, a tribe, with an inside and an outside."
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Danzy SennaQuote
"I think all serious artists at some point waver in their self-belief. But you also have to have those moments when you are deluded enough to believe that some crazy thing will work out. Even if it means returning to what you intended to do to begin with."
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Danzy SennaQuote
"...To grapple with race is not at odds or separate from the craft of writing fiction."
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Danzy SennaQuote
"Writing is so hard. It’s terrifying. And yet, when it goes well, it’s magical – better than any drug. You write for that fleeting moment when you get to see your Frankenstein creation come to life."
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Danzy SennaQuote
"I was making fun of the fact that the people with the least financial reward – the smallest piece of the pie – fight the most viciously amongst themselves. In other words, poets. There is no practical or market value to what poets do. It’s probably the purest form of writing in the artistic sense, but perhaps because of this, it’s the most ego-driven. Don’t get me wrong, I love poets, but there is a level of snark in that world that puts to shame any other genre. Novelists are second – almost as bad as poets about one another. I’ve never seen anyone get so much deep pleasure as a novelist reading a terrible review of another more successful novelist. Television is unlike poetry or fiction in that it’s a collaborative art. And because of this, amongst TV people there’s less viciousness on the surface. At least Jane [the protagonist of her novel Colored Television - Wikiquote] thinks so. But just beneath that smiling surface, there’s something maybe more dangerous."
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Danzy Senna