James Earl Jones

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

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

“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.”