Fred D'Aguiar Quotes

“Whenever I went to an historical moment that was sad or where something terrible happened, it was, for me, a learning moment, a teaching moment for those who survived.”

— Fred D'Aguiar

“At bottom, I'm a cheerful person.”

— Fred D'Aguiar

“I'm interested in someone who's mired in grief: how do you get back to that thing that makes them warm? Because you know that's in there.”

— Fred D'Aguiar

“Magical realism as a declaration in the text is usually when someone can't speak and then they must be magically reinvigorated in some way.”

— Fred D'Aguiar

I love the fact that I can go to a museum now that tells me I'm in the postmodern age.

— Fred D'Aguiar

“I think poetry can lead to policy, and I can hear the laughter when I say that.”

— Fred D'Aguiar

“I want a theory to come out to guide policy.”

— Fred D'Aguiar

People seem very comfortable having a kind of Cheesecake Factory-type of life.

— Fred D'Aguiar

“If you're just mired in privilege, there's nothing to learn; learning appears to be over.”

— Fred D'Aguiar

I try to be even-handed and fair-minded about my view of history. I don't romanticize one side and demonize the other, though I do think that if you're suffering a lot, especially in the Bob Marley sense, suffering becomes a kind of university out of which you'll learn some hard lessons.

— Fred D'Aguiar

“My grandfather is Portuguese. He betrayed what was expected of him and married my grandmother of African descent on my father's side.”

— Fred D'Aguiar

“Much of the visualizing is imaginative.”

— Fred D'Aguiar

“With kids, they force you to get out of bed. They force you to smile. They remind you of spontaneity.”

— Fred D'Aguiar

“Once I became historically aware, I realized there are these formative moments of history tied around tragedy and disaster and sacrifice, that led people to survive and take stock and move on with some kind of notion of betterment.”

— Fred D'Aguiar

I found it instructive and highly constructive as a writer to go to a point of disaster and come out with a feel for it and then some sort of a lesson based on feeling.

— Fred D'Aguiar

“Because I write intuitively and image-by-image and moment-by-moment, my writing has to be powered by feelings and emotions.”

— Fred D'Aguiar

“Bruce Lee, before he fought, he would try to visualize how the fight would go, because he was visualizing a victorious path out of the combat.”

— Fred D'Aguiar

People who are suffering have to visualize ways out of tragedy to actually get out of it.

— Fred D'Aguiar

“If you created a place in air where they're breathing and running around in, and then they speak in that fictional milieu, it's perfectly authenticated because the whole world relies on you, who've made it possible.”

— Fred D'Aguiar

“To have a young person speak back, to hand him the microphone for his first-person utterances, you'd have to have an imagined architecture, otherwise people would say you're putting words in their mouths.”

— Fred D'Aguiar

To close the empathetic gap, you really want to get the person emotionally identifying [with your subject and characters], and then when you do that, then you want sneak in a lesson about history and about politics and whatever else you might think about.

— Fred D'Aguiar

“The first hit on the nervous system is the one I'm most interested in, because I think if you hit the reader emotionally, the reader can't guarantee the lessons they would like to learn.”

— Fred D'Aguiar

“Eliot said that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." What he meant by that is, the emotional understanding comes before you understand the argument that follows later in the text.”

— Fred D'Aguiar

“I usually feel something before I know it.”

— Fred D'Aguiar

I was on the wrong side of colonization. My ancestry is mostly mired in having the colonial experience as colonized subjects, first as slaves and then as independent subjects with a post-colonial experience.

— Fred D'Aguiar

“I can't stay engaged for years with a book unless it has feelings. It can't be an idea for me - it has to be a felt thing.”

— Fred D'Aguiar

“If you die without agency as a child, but you have agency in your body [in the novel], how is it to be enacted unless it is being reimagined by a writer?”

— Fred D'Aguiar

“There's an imperative to make sure you distinguish fiction from the fact, because if the fact is doing the work, why did you do fiction? And once you raise the question of why - why do fiction? - then you have to answer it in your text as a kind of enactment of the answer.”

— Fred D'Aguiar

“People were always hungry, bullied, afraid, paranoid - so I just thought I'd show that in the novel in a kind of suffocating way.”

— Fred D'Aguiar

“When you walk to the end of a fiction, its procedure is 1) intuitive; and 2) emotional. Its intelligence is emotional, I think.”

— Fred D'Aguiar