Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

I want to be a poet and have a chance to explore that and let people know what's really on my mind.

My sophomore English teacher encouraged me to write for the school paper, and that's what got me started. Suddenly it struck me that being a writer could be a romantic and adventurous position. Previously, I had thought I would be a tennis pro, giving lessons at a local club. I thought that would be a good life, and it might have been.

I had a vision of myself as a novelist because that was where I could be serious. I couldn't with music.

As a youngster, I think I said I wanted to be a journalist, but that's a disguise for being a writer.

I knew I wanted to be a writer at 13. Before that, I told everyone I was going to be an artist.

I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.

I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry.

I'm not a rock star writing poetry. I don't feel like a rock star and I don't know what one is, actually. I'm a goalie/poet or a hotel guest/poet or a father/poet.

I wanted to be a poet. I wrote from ages 15 to 22, but I left it because I discovered, and fell in love with, cinema.

There's this pet phrase about writing that is bandied around particularly in workshops about "finding your own voice as a poet", which I suppose means that you come out from under the direct influence of other poets and have perhaps found a way to combine those influences so that it appears to be your own voice.

Writing is not a competitive sport. Everyone that writes has his or her own voice.

I wasn't one of those kids who grew up wanting to write or who read a particular book and thought: 'I want to do that!' I always told stories and wrote them down, but I never thought writing was a career path, even though, clearly, someone was writing the books and newspapers and magazines.

It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.

In 1982, when I was almost 26 years old, I decided I wanted to write fiction. I'd majored in journalism in college, and I'd always assumed I would write nonfiction.

But, somewhere in there, I did have the thought that this really fits in with my thinking about what I wanted to do; with what has to be done by a writer in order to stay alive as a writer.

I thought I'd definitely be a writer, whatever I did.

I find myself really feeling like it's possible that maybe the greater contribution I'm going to be able to make through this next phase of my life might be as a writer writing wonderful parts for women, or even writing wonderful parts for myself, you know?

Poetry was the first step, and from the age of 18, there was nothing else I wanted to do.

I always wanted to write as much as perform.

Whatever China I'd been born into, I would probably still have become a painter - I loved sketching portraits as a child, and began art classes at the age 7. But if China hadn't been under Maoist rule, I might never have become a writer.

Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.

In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.

Writing was my route to creative expression, and I needed to write about the things that interested me.

I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen.

I chose poetry. Actually, poetry chose me.