Quotes By James Earl Jones

I got out of the Army - in my world - I came to New York, for instance, when the civil rights movement was just beginning, and that created a certain energy, a certain rumble, a certain impetus for black actors.

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?

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.

More and more, when I single out the person out who inspired me most, I go back to my grandfather.

Once you begin to explain or excuse all events on racial grounds, you begin to indulge in the perilous mythology of race.

My youngest uncle Randy and I were the first members of our entire family to ever go to college.

So in my junior year, I switched to the drama department.

When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.

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.

I don't ever want to be a sentimentalist. I prefer to be a realist. I'm not a romantic really.

I was an adopted child of my grandparents, and I don't know how I can ever express my gratitude for that, because my parents would have been a mess, 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.

One day, my youngest uncle - the other one who was first to go to college, Randy - and I were sitting out on the front porch. And he was brilliant. He ended up - he just retired from Boeing Aircraft in Wichita, Kansas.

In the wintertime, in the snow country, citrus fruit was so rare, and if you got one, it was better than ambrosia.

My grandmother had the most dramatic effect on my life because she set me in one direction, and I had to go back the other direction for my sanity, and for my ability to be a social human being.

We children learned responsibility automatically.

The arts have always been an important ingredient to the health of a nation, but we haven't gotten there yet.

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.

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.

I was as content Off-Broadway as I was in a big Hollywood movie, and, I just try to be content wherever I am, you know.

Your own need to be shines out of any dream or creation you imagine.

You don't build a bond without being present.

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.

I knew real show business from my father, who had been an actor since he left the world of boxing.

One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter.

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.

Acting is not about anything romantic, not even fantasy, although you do create fantasy.

There is not enough magic in a bloodline to forge an instant, irrevocable bond.

I happened to happened to land in a time, in the middle '60s, that without knowing it, and without being told by the history of theater - which we now see from a historical point of view was an explosive time.

Reading was a big thing, yes. Books were a big thing. But the things that stick out were the newspapers.