Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

I'm interested in trying to explore what I think is the truth at a given time in my life, and part of the process of being honest is - in my mind - talking about the idea that you're watching a movie. You're sitting here watching a movie. And I like that. It appeals to me intellectually, and also in a way I can't even explain.

I think anything that anyone writes that's any good is going to have a lot of autobiography.

Let us hold our discussion together in our own persons, making trial of the truth and of ourselves.

I am not 'in pursuit of truth.' It is not my 'quarry.' I am of my human nature a thinker, and conscious of need, responsibility of thinking-speaking with truth. I do not go about hunting 'truths.'

The compelling drive to get at the truth is what improves us all as psychologists and is part and parcel of intellectual integrity. But I do urge that we not let the drive for honesty put blinders on us and cut off our range of vision so that we miss the very thing we set out the understand - namely, the living human being.

For a memoir to really succeed, the author has to do such hard work before they come to the page. They have to do a brutal self-examination of everything they believe to be true.

I look back on my liberal political beliefs with a sort of wonder - as another exercise in self-involvement - rewarding myself for some superiority I could not logically describe.

You know more about me than I do about myself, that's probably true.

Clarity and consistency are not enough: the quest for truth requires humility and effort.

People do ask me for advice for some reason. And I'll just kind of pose it back to them and let them answer on their own. I never like to give my advice 'cause I don't want them to come back and 'You were wrong! You ruined my life!' so it's more about 'Hey, this is what you just told me. What does that sound like to you?'

Look at the evidence and to be willing to question your own truths, and to be willing to scrutinize things that you hold dearly because that way, that transparency, that self-awareness, will protect you from ever becoming somebody that whose beliefs somehow make them have myopic vision about what could be.

All writing is an act of self-exploration. Even a grocery list says something about you; how much more does a novel say?

If you cannot find the truth within yourself, where else do you expect to find it?

I am a humble but very earnest seeker after truth.

Every writer, to some extent, writes about himself.

It's actually easier to do autobiographical stories. The story is already there. It's a matter of carving away what doesn't fit rather than building up from nothing.

It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception.

To me, at forty-four years old, my book was a search for truth and identity.

I can't work out much about myself or what I see in the world around me unless I do it through writing.

First novels tend to be blood-lettings, and they're focused on you, not the reader.

Writing a book about yourself is like therapy, and you go 'Oh My God, that's the reason that happened.' Writing about it, you're forced to really examine things.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

It's so easy for me to do a boy-bashing pop song, but to sit down and write honestly about something that's really close to me, something I've been through, it's a totally different thing.

A vision of truth which does not call upon us to get out of our armchair - why, this is the desideratum of mankind.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.