Gloria Naylor Quotations

You can't teach talent. You can't put in what God left out - but you can teach confidence.

I realize at one point, that I was being followed, and then I began to see the surveillance that was going past the road on my house. And so, these cars began to surveil me. People began to follow me around, and it did, it was very disrupting to think that your privacy was being violated, and for no reason that I could come up with.

Old as she was, she still missed her daddy sometimes.

I wrote what I felt I had to write, and I'm willing to put my own sanity and my reputation behind it.

Spoiled. That's all it's about - can't live without this, can't live without that. You can live without anything you weren't born with, and you can make it through on even half of that.

Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.

I don't believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.

Life is accepting what is and working from that.

Lord keep her safe since you can't keep her sane.

One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.

The intelligence community, for the most part, has no accountability at all; to the Congress, to us the American people, and so they feel that they above the law.

It ain't really what you'd call change. It's all happened before and it'll happen again with a different set of facts.

Even though the planet is round, there are just too many spots where you can find yourself hanging on to the edge just like I was; and unless there's some space, some place, to take a breather for awhile, the edge of the world - frightening as it is

It's as if I've arrived in a place where it's all spirit and no body - an overwhelming sense of calm...I actually began to feel blessed.

His entire life was becoming a race against the natural -- and he was winning.

Once I unlocked the mystery of the alphabet that led to words, a multitude of words connecting me to the world, there was no stopping me.

black isn't beautiful and it isn't ugly - black is! It's not kinky hair and it's not straight hair - it just is.

They all trying to say something with music that you can't say with plain talk. There ain't really no words for love or pain. And the way I see it, only fools go around trying to talk their love or talk their pain. So the smart people make music and you can kinda hear about it without them saying anything.

The last time you're doing something - knowing you're doing it for the last - makes it even more alive than the first.

A myth is more powerful - and more lasting - than reality.

Time is a funny thing. I was always puzzled with the way a single day could stretch itself out to the point of eternity in your mind, all while years melted down into the fraction of a second.

Why do I write? The truth, the unvarnished truth, is that I haven't a clue.

Self-consciousness is really a form of egotism.

Old as he was, he still missed his daddy sometimes.

The right woman is the one you can live with, not the one in your head.

There's something hypocritical about a city that keeps half of its population underground half of the time; you can start believing that there's much more space than there really is-to live, to work.

Home. It's being new and old all rolled into one. Measuring your new against old friends, old ways, old places, Knowing that as long as the old survives, you can keep changing as much as you want without the nightmare of waking up to a total stranger.

Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystalize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days. It is silent and elusive, refusing to be damned and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the conciousness at ragged, unexpected intervals.

Six months of looking for a job had made me an expert at picking out the people who, like me, were hurrying up to wait - in somebody's outer anything for a chance to make it through their inner doors to prove that you could type two words a minute, or not drool on your blouse while answering difficult questions about your middle initial and date of birth.

It's as if I've arrived in a place where it's all spirit and no body -- an overwhelming sense of calm . . . I actually began to feel blessed.

Contempt mates well with pity.

The music in his laughter had a way of rounding off the missing notes in her soul.

We get so caught up in what a man isn't. It's what he is that counts.

A loud voice is not always angry; a soft voice not always to be dismissed; and a well-placed silence can be the indisputable last word.

She could walk through a lightning storm without being touched; grab a bolt of lightning in the palm of her hand; use the heat of lightning to start the kindling going under her medicine pot. She turned the moon into salve, the stars into swaddling cloth, and healed the wounds of every creature walking up on two or down on four.

Writers are voracious readers. Once I unlocked the mystery of the alphabet that led to words, a multitude of words connecting me to the world, there was no stopping me. Everything was fair game, from Louisa May Alcott to my older cousin's True Romance Magazines, from Lewis Carroll to the backs of cereal boxes. All of this fed me, but it took certain books to make me grow. I don't want to work without a sense of drama, without passion, or without both eyes open to the world around me.

In a contest between new technology and old ways of life, it is the traditional rhythms that will hold. Traditional societies make up more than two-thirds of the world, the two-thirds that will not be going online to "save" time but will remain wedded to the knowledge that if the bus doesn't come that day, it will come someday. After all, there is nothing but time.

That's one of the privileges of old age - you can give plenty of advice 'cause most folks think that's all you got left anyway.

I don't want to write without a sense of drama, without passion, or without both eyes open to the world around me.

a star dies in heaven every time you snatch away someone's dream.

There is a problem in America. An Irish or Polish American can write a story and it's an American story. When a Black American writes a story, it's called a Black story. I take exception to that. Every artist has articulated to his own experience. The problem is that some people do not see Blacks as Americans.

Words themselves are innocuous; it is the consensus that gives them true power.

I don't believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or to make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.