James Earl Jones the Actor, biography, facts and quotes

"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"

"You don't build a bond without being present"

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

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

"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"

"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"

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

"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"

"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"

"We children learned responsibility automatically"

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

"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"

"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?"

"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 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"

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

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

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

"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"

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

"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 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 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"

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

"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"

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

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

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

"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"

"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 in my junior year, I switched to the drama department"

"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 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"

Occup.	Actor
From	USA
Born	January 17, 1931
Age	93 years

Facts about James Earl Jones

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