Fred D'Aguiar Quotes

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

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.

I usually feel something before I know it.

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

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

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.

At bottom, I'm a cheerful person.

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?

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.

I want a theory to come out to guide policy.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Much of the visualizing is imaginative.

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.

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

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.

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