James Earl Jones Quotes
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My youngest uncle Randy and I were the first members of our entire family to ever go to college.
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I really think I ambled through a lot of my life, or ambled from one thing to the other.
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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.
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I mean, my people were very, very simple. They were peasant people, you know?
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Reading was a big thing, yes. Books were a big thing. But the things that stick out were the newspapers.
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So in my junior year, I switched to the drama department.
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You don't build a bond without being present.
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I consider myself a novice film actor.
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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.
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The arts have always been an important ingredient to the health of a nation, but we haven't gotten there yet.
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I don't ever want to be a sentimentalist. I prefer to be a realist. I'm not a romantic really.
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One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter.
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Once you begin to explain or excuse all events on racial grounds, you begin to indulge in the perilous mythology of race.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Acting is not about anything romantic, not even fantasy, although you do create fantasy.
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There is not enough magic in a bloodline to forge an instant, irrevocable bond.
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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.
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No one asked me to be an actor, so no one owed me. There was no entitlement.
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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.