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My youngest uncle Randy and I were the first members of our entire family to ever go to college.
James Earl Jones -
I really think I ambled through a lot of my life, or ambled from one thing to the other.
James Earl Jones
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There haven't been enough profound things written about what being black means and what a black character is. Nobody knows.
James Earl Jones -
I mean, my people were very, very simple. They were peasant people, you know?
James Earl Jones -
And it was the idea that you can do a play - like a Shakespeare play, or any well-written play, Arthur Miller, whatever - and say things you could never imagine saying, never imagine thinking in your own life.
James Earl Jones -
So I was determined to use my last two years in college doing something I thought I would enjoy, which was acting. And it was probably because there was girls over in the drama school too, you know?
James Earl Jones -
And nothing embittered me, which is important, because I think ethnic people and women in this society can end up being embittered because of the lack of affirmative action, you know.
James Earl Jones -
Reading was a big thing, yes. Books were a big thing. But the things that stick out were the newspapers.
James Earl Jones
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So in my junior year, I switched to the drama department.
James Earl Jones -
You don't build a bond without being present.
James Earl Jones -
I consider myself a novice film actor.
James Earl Jones -
My grandmother though, began to prepare in her own neurotic - and I think psychotic - way to face racism. So she taught us to be racist, which is something I had to undo later when I got to Michigan, you know.
James Earl Jones -
The arts have always been an important ingredient to the health of a nation, but we haven't gotten there yet.
James Earl Jones -
I don't ever want to be a sentimentalist. I prefer to be a realist. I'm not a romantic really.
James Earl Jones
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One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter.
James Earl Jones -
Once you begin to explain or excuse all events on racial grounds, you begin to indulge in the perilous mythology of race.
James Earl Jones -
I think stutterers are funny. And I know it's rude and politically incorrect to laugh at stutterers. But I think it is okay because I know why they're funny. They make people nervous. People think, when on earth are they going to get the word out, so they start laughing out of their own nervousness.
James Earl Jones -
The goal wasn't to be a millionaire or to be a Hollywood star. That was not the goal. The goal was something about - the goal was to find the goal, but I knew where it was.
James Earl Jones -
You sang in church, you know, and you didn't act at all. You tried not to act, you tried to tell the truth. The idea of being a troubadour on the road singing for your supper was very disturbing to him.
James Earl Jones -
There is not enough magic in a bloodline to forge an instant, irrevocable bond.
James Earl Jones
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Acting is not about anything romantic, not even fantasy, although you do create fantasy.
James Earl Jones -
So in my sophomore year, I took a senior anatomy class. I thought anatomy - being the thing that I should be most interested in - and if I could hack, as we called it, a senior class, I would continue. I didn't hack the senior class.
James Earl Jones -
No one asked me to be an actor, so no one owed me. There was no entitlement.
James Earl Jones -
It has to be real, and I think a lot of the problems we have as a society is because we don't acknowledge that family is important, and it has to be people who are present, you know, and mothers and fathers, both are not present enough with children.
James Earl Jones