Quotes By James Earl Jones

I mean, my people were very, very simple. They were peasant people, you know?

Even during the rationing period, during World War II, we didn't have the anxiety that we'd starve, because we grew our own potatoes, you know? And our own hogs, and our own cows and stuff, you know.

And I think, on the other end, there were actors who were not as good as I was, perhaps who could have hung in too, but began to blame everything on race.

You weren't going to the theater to change the world, but you had a chance to affect the world, the thinking and the feelings of the world.

So by the time I got to Michigan I was a stutterer. I couldn't talk. So my first year of school was my first mute year and then those mute years continued until I got to high school.

I was preparing myself for the theater, and... I got a little job here and a job there, but it wasn't going well, and I considered some time before the mid-60s that maybe I should consider something else.

When I was in New York after I left the Army, I studied for two years at the American Theater Wing, studied acting, which involved dance and fencing and speech classes and history of theater, all that.

I think the extent to which I have any balance at all, any mental balance, is because of being a farm kid and being raised in those isolated rural areas.

No one asked me to be an actor, so no one owed me. There was no entitlement.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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