Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

Baldwin gave expression to the longings of blacks in exalted prose. He was embraced, in the tradition of Negro Firsterism, even by those who never sat down with a book, as our preeminent literary spokesman, whether he liked it or not. Neither athlete nor entertainer, but nevertheless a star.

I read a lot of W.E.B. Du Bois, who wrote 'The Souls of Black Folk.'

My mother introduced me to more academic-minded writers, Cornel West and Skip Gates. In her library, I came across, when I was very young, Harold Cruse's 'The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,' which is like a bible of Negro intellectuals from Frederick Douglass to Amiri Baraka.

When I was growing up, 'Ebony Magazine' was a must read in our household. In those pages I found our news, our stories, and my pride.

BET was a touchstone for me and a lot of my friends - it was a place you could go to see exactly what being black in 1992 and 1996 was like and what it was supposed to look like.

I read every one of the books on the shelf marked American Negro Literature. I became a nationalist, a colour nationalist, through the writings of men and women who lived a world away from me.

When I was younger, I remember there was a really famous book, and it was called 'The People Could Fly.' And so this idea of, kind of like, black characters kind of jumping into space and kind of the challenge that they presented to gravity I thought was really interesting.

As a child, I experienced black culture as many people did in America: on the TV, radio, and stages.

When we say Afro American, we include everyone in the Western Hemisphere of African descent. South America is America. Central America is America. South America has many people in it of African descent.

There haven't been enough profound things written about what being black means and what a black character is. Nobody knows.

I do consider myself part of black history.

My composition often goes toward the black middle class or the black super-wealthy or strong historical black figures.

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.

There is a distinctive African American culture that has roots in Africa and evolved on American soil.

Jimmy Baldwin was not only a writer, an international literary figure: he was a man, spirit, voice - old and black and terrible as that first ancestor.

I wanted to explore black culture, and I wanted that culture to be a revelation.

All black art is always judged to illuminate our experience and prove that our stories and our history and our lives matter. And that goes back to Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston - take your pick.

'Smart Funny and Black' is basically a live black pop culture game show that I created. We have a live band. We have two contestants that we call 'blacksperts.' They come on stage and compete in games that I've created that test their knowledge of black culture, black history, and the black experience.

Manhattan was the capital of the twentieth century for black writers, artists, and intellectuals as much as it was for their white counterparts.

The name James Baldwin had been around the house for as long as I could remember and meant almost as much as that of Martin Luther King.

To me, Harlem is one of the most important places on the earth, particularly when it comes to talking about African Americans.

You can't just say in one sentence what is blackness or what is black culture or what makes you who you are.

Michael Jackson National African American Art Examiner Series

When I was a kid, I'd go to the African-American section in the bookstore, and I'd try and find African-American people I hadn't read before. So in that sense the category was useful to me. But it's not useful to me as I write. I don't sit down to write an African-American zombie story or an African-American story about elevators. I'm writing a story about elevators which happens to talk about race in different ways. Or I'm writing a zombie novel which doesn't have that much to do with being black in America. That novel is really about survival.

The 22 million or 30 million, whatever the case may be, Afro-Americans in the United States were still Africans.