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" I had to learn to not be so hard. And I had a wife and, at that time, a partner when Samori was born, and for most of Samori's life, a partner, who, for whatever reason, did not have to learn that and was very tender and very, very soft with him. "

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" We had particular policies in this country that resulted in the larger share of poverty that we have in African-American communities. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

African-American

Poverty

Had

" With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin. "

" I'm not familiar particularly with Hillary Clinton's neighborhood, but I wish people were a little bit more curious about what we call privilege and about why it's there. Black people in this country have no choice but to be curious. We have to know. I wish folks would do a little bit more investigation. "

" I would say as a journalist, I would envision travelling to other countries that have had to reckon with their past and see how they've done it: what worked, what didn't work, finding characters that would tell the story of how that process was done. "

" I have never read 'To Kill A Mockingbird.' "

" One of the things we tell ourselves as African-Americans is if we work hard, play by the rules, we do start back a little ways, but if we can be twice as good, somehow we can escape history and heritage and legacy. "

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Over

Process

" The African-American tradition, in the main, is very, very church-based, very, very Christian. It accepts, you know, certain narratives about the world. I didn't really have that present in my house. "

" The lives of African-Americans in this country are characterized by violence for most of our history. Much of that violence, at least to some extent, you know, done by the very state that's supposed to protect them. "

" I think it's really important to be conscious of yourself and the world around you. For me, that meant reading a lot and reporting. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Yourself

Reading

" If, to the end of its existence, America harbors white supremacy, I don't know how remarkable that would be. France has dealt with anti-Semitism since its inception. "

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

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Black

Learn

" For me, my writing benefits from my experience. "

" The plunder of black communities is not a bump along the road, but it is, in fact, the road itself that you can't have in America without enslavement, without Jim Crow, terrorism, everything that came after that. "

" The ties between the Obama White House and the hip-hop community are genuine. "

" 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. "

" One of the things that's really, really present in 'Between the World and Me' is, I am in some ways outside of the African-American tradition. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Tradition

Present

" You can't make a direct comparison between middle-class African Americans and middle-class white Americans, affluent African Americans and affluent white Americans. The amount of wealth tends to be less. "

" Every writer dreams of having the ability to hold forth for 8,000 words and pull all these different forms together: history, reportage, journalism. That was all I really wanted, and 'The Atlantic' was my first high-profile opportunity. "

" There's no way to understand housing as it exists today without federal policy. "

" I wouldn't argue that Mitt Romney is a white supremacist. "

" If Obama's enormous symbolic power draws primarily from being the country's first black president, it also draws from his membership in hip-hop's foundational generation. "

" Long view of history shows evil triumphing more often than we'd like to admit. That's just how it is. I don't despair too much about dying, either. It's just a fact of being human. "

" Comic books have a long, fraught history with sexism. "

" 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. "

" You don't make a case for reparations thinking, 'Oh yeah, people are gonna love this.' I didn't see that coming. "

" 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. "

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

" In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage. "