Quotes from James Earl Jones

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

You don't build a bond without being present.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

There is a very fine line between love and nausea.

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

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

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