James Earl Jones Quotes
-
My youngest uncle Randy and I were the first members of our entire family to ever go to college.
-
I really think I ambled through a lot of my life, or ambled from one thing to the other.
-
There haven't been enough profound things written about what being black means and what a black character is. Nobody knows.
-
I mean, my people were very, very simple. They were peasant people, you know?
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
-
Reading was a big thing, yes. Books were a big thing. But the things that stick out were the newspapers.
-
So in my junior year, I switched to the drama department.
-
You don't build a bond without being present.
-
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.
-
I consider myself a novice film actor.
-
I don't ever want to be a sentimentalist. I prefer to be a realist. I'm not a romantic really.
-
The arts have always been an important ingredient to the health of a nation, but we haven't gotten there yet.
-
One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter.
-
Once you begin to explain or excuse all events on racial grounds, you begin to indulge in the perilous mythology of race.
-
There is not enough magic in a bloodline to forge an instant, irrevocable bond.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Acting is not about anything romantic, not even fantasy, although you do create fantasy.
-
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.
-
The world is filled with violence. Because criminals carry guns, we decent law-abiding citizens should also have guns. Otherwise they will win and the decent people will loose.
-
No one asked me to be an actor, so no one owed me. There was no entitlement.