James Earl Jones Quotations

When you are mute, you become a good listener - it's all one-way. You appreciate the written word. You appreciate the sound.

Stuttering is painful. In Sunday school, I'd try to read my lessons, and the children behind me were falling on the floor with laughter.

There's nothing I would retire for, so I won't retire.

I think self-criticism is sort of a given when you're an actor. It's also about being curious and not being flippant. Anyone who accepts being in this noble profession is automatically self-critical.

Speech is a very important aspect of being human. A whisper doesn't cut it.

People who lusted after Marilyn Monroe had no idea she stuttered. It is the secret of her sexiness, actually.

You don't build a bond without being present.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Writing can give full meaning to characters and avoid pure stereotype.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

There haven't been enough profound things written about what being black means and what a black character is. Nobody knows.

You cannot be an actor like I am and not have been in some of the worst movies like I have. But I stand before you deeply honored, mighty grateful and just plain gobsmacked.

Denzel Washington, Sidney Poitier, Robert Redford, Tom Cruise: those guys have well-planned careers. I'm just on a journey. Wherever I run across a job, I say, 'Okay, I'll do that.'

I love doing commercials! Usually, they have enough money that they can take time and photograph it well.

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.

I do not know if it is true that all actors want to direct and all directors want to act, but in 1972 I tried directing and decided I had better stick to acting.

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

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

Once you begin to explain or excuse...

The one constant in life is baseball

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 love to see actors' work. I love to surf channels late at night and accidentally run into movies I hadn't seen before. It makes me very proud of the profession.

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.

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 found my voice in books...

The inclusiveness of the Drama League luncheon is one of the most exciting things about it. I get to see old friends and meet new friends. Of course I can't tell who anybody is if they're under the age of 75. So my old friends become my new friends.

We used to be "shiftless and lazy," now we're "fearsome and awesome." I think the black man should take pride in that.

My voice is for hire. My endorsement is not for hire. I will do a voice-over, but I cannot endorse without making a different kind of commitment. My politics are very personal and subjective.

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.

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.

Before my grandpa built his own church, we went to the neighboring town, and it was a white community. You know, up north, mostly middle European people and Indians, Chippewa Indians. We were welcome to that church, but once we got in, they didn't know what to do with us.

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

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

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

I consider myself a novice film actor.

Actors never discuss future plans.

I really think I ambled through a lot of my life, or ambled from one thing to the other.

A man's got to take care of his family. You live in my house, you sleep your behind on my bedclothes, you put my food in your belly because you are my son; you are my flesh and blood, not because I like you. It is my duty to take care of you. I owe a responsibility to you.

There is a very fine line between love and nausea.

We children learned responsibility automatically.

The last thing I want to be is a rich black superstar. I just want to act.

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.

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.

I agree with my father, Albert Einstein, don't believe every quote you read on the internet.

Love was just a word to me. Until you came along and gave it meaning.

Ray, people will come Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won't mind if you look around, you'll say. It's only $20 per person. They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack.

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.

I'd like to film a British commercial; they're better than American ones.

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

Trying to make someone fall in love with you is about as pointless as trying to control who you fall in love with.

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

Just so you know, there's a space that only you can fill. Just so you know, I loved you then, I guess I always will.

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.

In our resolve to build a better world... we seek to summon what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.

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.

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

Love is just love, it can never be explained.

Don't you try and go through life worried if someone had liked you or not. You best make sure that they are doing right by you.

The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and what could be again.

If you live in an oppressive society, you've got to be resilient. You can't let each little thing crush you. You have take every encounter and make yourself larger, rather than allow yourself to be diminished by it.

If you expect someone else to guide you, you'll be lost.

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.

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.

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.

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.