Fred D'Aguiar Quotes

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.

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.

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.

Much of the visualizing is imaginative.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Any place where their thoughts are not allowed to stray is guarded by his voices steering them back to the permitted pastures. Any sadness or longing is immediately burned from the mind by the steady flame of his teachings in his voice. Sadness, depression, longings are luxuries. How can any sane mind be sad at the prospect of the kingdom of heaven, unless the sadness is merely impatience?

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.

I usually feel something before I know it.

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.

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.

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.

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

I want a theory to come out to guide policy.

At bottom, I'm a cheerful person.

A child screams with joy and a child screams with pain, and the difference is in the timbre of that scream. Decibels of joy strike the inner ear differently from those of pain.

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