Fred D'Aguiar Quotes

• 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

  Moving, Sacrifice, People

  Source: therumpus.net

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Teaching, Historical, Moments

  Source: therumpus.net

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Independent, Firsts, Sides

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Views, Suffering

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

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

  Fred D'Aguiar

  Privilege, Ifs

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I usually feel something before I know it.

  Fred D'Aguiar

  Feels, Knows

  Source: therumpus.net

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Running, Air, Breathing

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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

  Fred D'Aguiar

  People, Suffering, Tragedy

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Feelings, Emotion

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Years, Ideas

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Character, Thinking, Sneak In

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Fighting, Trying, Path

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Fiction, Answers, Facts

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Feelings, Lessons, Disaster

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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

  Fred D'Aguiar

  People, Kind, Factories

  Source: therumpus.net

  9 Copy quote

• Much of the visualizing is imaginative.

  Fred D'Aguiar

  Imaginative, Visualizing

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  People, Way, Kind

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Way, Speak, Realism

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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

  Fred D'Aguiar

  Laughter, Thinking, Policy

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Emotional, Thinking, Fiction

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• At bottom, I'm a cheerful person.

  Fred D'Aguiar

  Cheerful, Bottom, Persons

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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

  Fred D'Aguiar

  Museums, Age, Facts

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Agency, Body

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Emotional, Understanding, Argument

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Grief, Knows, Get Back

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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