James Earl Jones famous quotes

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

#Love #Heart #Reality

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Winning #Gun #Law

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

#Magic #Enough #Instant

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Crush #Encounters #Littles

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Baseball #Army #Past

You don't build a bond without being present.
-- James Earl Jones

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Kids #Thinking #Agriculture

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Drama #Writing #Feelings

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

#Angel #World #Abraham

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

#Grandfather #Inspired #Persons

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

#Race #Events #Excuse

The last thing I want to be is a rich black superstar. I just want to act.
-- James Earl Jones

#Black #Want #Lasts

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

#Falling In Love #Love You #Trying

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Laughter #Children #Fall

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#War #Anxiety #Stuff

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#White #People #Grandpa

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#School #Years #Michigan

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Running #Night #Actors

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Thinking #People #Laughing

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Uncles #College #Kansas

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Acting #Directors #Actors

So in my junior year, I switched to the drama department.
-- James Earl Jones

#Drama #Years #Junior Year

Once you begin to explain or excuse...
-- James Earl Jones

#African American #Excuse

Your own need to be shines out of any dream or creation you imagine.
-- James Earl Jones

#Dream #Shining #Needs

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

#Pride #Men #Thinking

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#New York #Army #Rights

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Thinking #Feelings #Theatre

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Gratitude #Children #Grandparent

Writing can give full meaning to characters and avoid pure stereotype.
-- James Earl Jones

#Writing #Character #Giving

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

#Enough #Photograph #Wells

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

#Father #Real #Boxing

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Grandmother #One Direction #Sanity

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Grandmother #Thinking #Racism

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

#Want #Realist

I consider myself a novice film actor.
-- James Earl Jones

#Actors #Novices #Film

Actors never discuss future plans.
-- James Earl Jones

#Actors #Future Plans #Plans

Acting is not about anything romantic, not even fantasy, although you do create fantasy.
-- James Earl Jones

#Romantic Love #Acting #Fantasy

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

#Sexy #Ideas #People

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

#Thinking

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

#Film #British

I mean, my people were very, very simple. They were peasant people, you know?
-- James Earl Jones

#Mean #Simple #People

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

#Cutting #Important #Speech

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Trying #Hollywood #Broadway

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

#Actors #Entitlement

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Mother #Children #Father

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

#Uncles #College #Firsts

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

#Country #Snow #Fruit

We children learned responsibility automatically.
-- James Earl Jones

#Children #Responsibility

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?
-- James Earl Jones

#Girl #Drama #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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Jobs #Littles #Should

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Ideas #Singing #Church

The one constant in life is baseball
-- James Earl Jones

#Baseball #Famous Baseball #Life Is

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

#Book #Reading #Sticks

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Senior #Years #Class

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Stars #Goal #Hollywood

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Money #Children #Past

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

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Space #I Loved You

Love is just love, it can never be explained.
-- James Earl Jones

#Love Is #Sick #Love Sick

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Dance #New York #Army

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.
-- James Earl Jones

#Views #Land #Knowing