TA-NEHISI COATES

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

When people think about reparations, they immediately think about people who've been dead for 100 years.

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.

When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don't understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else.

The country in which reparations actually happen is a very different one than the one we live in.

'White America' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies.

We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system.

My dad always associated information with liberation. He was very much in that Malcolm X tradition.

We are all losers in comparison to Malala Yousafzai. But we are not all geniuses. Like me.

You can oppose reparations all you want, but you got to know the facts. You really, really do.

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

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

Everybody thinks that an important book has to be a big, long book.

For me, my writing benefits from my experience.

I do understand how hate eats at the soul and how to purge yourself of hate.

I feel sorry for people who only know comic books through movies. I really do.

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.

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

I think a lot about the private emotions of black people - what we feel and yet is rarely publicly expressed.

I think riots happen when communities are under pressure for long periods of time. That's not a mistake.

I was about 13 or 14 when I heard Malcolm X's speech 'Message to the Grass Roots.'

I was born in West Baltimore, lived in a situation in which violence was everywhere.

I'm not going to break up my family, not for a book.

If I wrote a Jewish superhero, he'd have awesome time-traveling powers. I'd call him Doctorow.

It meant something to see people who looked like me in comic books. It was this beautiful place that I felt pop culture should look like.