Art & Creativity Quote by James Earl Jones

James Earl Jones is quietly demoting the book from its pedestal and elevating the messier artifact that actually trains a citizen: the newspaper. The line has the cadence of someone conceding what they’re expected to praise ("Reading... Books...") before pivoting to what really formed him. That pivot matters. It’s not anti-literary; it’s anti-sentimental about how culture flatters itself. Books are retrospective and curated. Newspapers are immediate, contested, noisy - the daily draft of reality.

Coming from an actor whose voice became shorthand for authority, the subtext is especially rich: authority isn’t born from lofty texts alone, but from proximity to the world as it happens. Newspapers teach tempo and stakes. They’re full of conflict, names, institutions, error, correction - the raw material of public life. For a Black man coming of age in mid-century America, they also function as a barometer: what gets framed as normal, what gets buried, whose suffering is deemed newsworthy. You don’t just learn to read; you learn to read between the lines.

There’s an implicit critique here of the way we mythologize upbringing through "classic" literature. Jones points to a more democratic education: headlines, local politics, sports, obituaries, classifieds - a cross-section of society that books often abstract away from. It’s a reminder that culture isn’t only made in libraries; it’s made in the daily argument about what counts as truth.