Quotes from Ta-Nehisi Coates

I don't attempt to make people uncomfortable; I think that my standards in terms of art and journalism always have necessitated my discomfort.

The process of getting conscious, for me, was a very, very uncomfortable, disturbing, and sometimes physically painful process. And so that's the standard to which I write, because it was what I've experienced over my time.

Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.

I just think that if one is going to preach nonviolence and one is going to advocate for nonviolence, one's standard should be consistent.

There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.

Breitbart media is named after the same gentleman who basically framed Shirley Sherrod during the Obama administration.

My job is to look out on that world that I write about and be as honest as I possibly can about that world. If that's optimistic and uplifting, OK. If it's not, OK.

My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that was exactly what was happening all around us.

Storytellers have the right to answer any question they choose.

I think Barack Obama was born into a home not just to a white woman and white grandparents, but a white woman and white grandparents who shockingly told him it was okay that he was black and that he should not be ashamed of it and that he should, in fact, be proud of it.

African Americans are one of the oldest ethnic groups in this country. We been here since the beginning. Before the beginning.

The two endorsements I'm most proud of come from Isabel Wilkerson and Toni Morrison. The latter is the greatest American fiction writer of our time, and the former is on her way to being the greatest American nonfiction writer of our time.

I write what I write in the way that I write it. I'm not being abstract, you know. I'm talking about something that, you know, is a part of my life.

Typically, there's this perspective among writers - and black writers: there's this idea that there is one person - and maybe beyond writers - among blacks, there is always one person who everyone should go to learn about all things black.

As an African-American, we stand on the shoulders of people who fought despite not seeing victories in their lifetime or even in their children's lifetime or even in their grandchildren's lifetime. So fatalism isn't really an option.

Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing 'mere' about symbols.

It's kind of selfish to say that you're only going to fight for a victory that you will live to see.

I don't completely understand why people in Aspen want to hear what I have to say.

Donald Trump did not appear by magic.

I love America the way I love my family - I was born into it. And there's no escape out of it.

It's hard for me to view Baltimore outside the context of what Baltimore has always been in my mind: a violent place.

I had no expectations of white people at all.

I never expected my writing to become as popular as it did.

An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.