Top 85 Quotes About James Earl Jones
#1. The movie I've seen a million times - wait, that's not possible - my favorite movie of all times is 'The Empire Strikes Back,' directed by Irvin Kershner, executive-produced by the great George Lucas and stars Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams, James Earl Jones.
Donald Faison
#2. The trailblazers are my role models in this industry: Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, James Earl Jones, and Billy Dee Williams. I keep their pictures in my trailer and try to measure to their standards every time I act.
Brian J. White
#3. When I was a young kid, my pops introduced me to it. He took me to Harlem, 145th and Edgecombe, to watch the filming of Claudine with James Earl Jones and Diahann Carroll. That was my first taste of seeing a set and the cameras, and I was bit by the acting bug at a young age.
Tracy Morgan
#4. Thank God that I am not over 75 so that James Earl Jones knows who the hell I am.
Linda Lavin
#5. The opportunity to carry water every night to James Earl Jones on stage is a dream come true.
John Larroquette
#6. Oh, people will come, Ray," Phillip intones, doing his best James Earl Jones. "People will most definitely come.
Jonathan Tropper
#7. Do I call? Do I text? Do I send a Facebook message? Do I send up a smoke signal? How does one do that? Will I set my rented house on fire? How embarrassed will I be when I have to tell the home's owner, actor James Earl Jones, that I burned his house down trying to send a smoke signal?
Aziz Ansari
#8. My voice dropped when I was 14. And when I was 14, I might have weighed 75 pounds. So you can imagine how strange that must have been: like James Earl Jones speaking through a sock puppet.
Benjamin Percy
#9. One person I've always wanted to work with who would be an amazing guest star would be James Earl Jones.
Nancy McKeon
#10. Othello is about many different kinds of love: it's about the light, beautiful side of love, and it's about the twisted, darker side of love, and it's about how, if you flip the emotional coin, love can make you do terrible things. (James Earl Jones)
Susannah Carson
#11. My very first role was with James Earl Jones on 'Gabriel's Fire' on TV. He drove a Chevy Citation, which is the exact same car that I bought from a guy in San Francisco called Sandy Boone. I showed up on set, and James Earl Jones was driving the car I had bought from Sandy for $250.
Leland Orser
#12. Listening back to your speaking voice for the first time, unless you're James Earl Jones, it's a quite distressing process for most people.
Philip Selway
#13. since I know for a fact that her class had been in the physics labs when Mr. Fibs got attacked by the bees he thought he'd genetically modified to obey commands from a whistle. (Turns out they only respond to the voice of James Earl Jones.)
Ally Carter
#14. 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
#15. 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
#17. A man's got to take care of his family. You live in my house, you sleep your behind on my bedclothes, you put my food in your belly because you are my son; you are my flesh and blood, not because I like you. It is my duty to take care of you. I owe a responsibility to you.
James Earl Jones
#18. 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.
James Earl Jones
#19. I love doing commercials! Usually, they have enough money that they can take time and photograph it well.
James Earl Jones
#20. Denzel Washington, Sidney Poitier, Robert Redford, Tom Cruise: those guys have well-planned careers. I'm just on a journey. Wherever I run across a job, I say, 'Okay, I'll do that.'
James Earl Jones
#22. 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
#23. One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter.
James Earl Jones
#24. I mean, my people were very, very simple. They were peasant people, you know?
James Earl Jones
#25. There is not enough magic in a bloodline to forge an instant, irrevocable bond.
James Earl Jones
#26. 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.
James Earl Jones
#27. The inclusiveness of the Drama League luncheon is one of the most exciting things about it. I get to see old friends and meet new friends. Of course I can't tell who anybody is if they're under the age of 75. So my old friends become my new friends.
James Earl Jones
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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.
James Earl Jones
#31. I'd like to film a British commercial; they're better than American ones.
James Earl Jones
#32. 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
#33. When you are mute, you become a good listener - it's all one-way. You appreciate the written word. You appreciate the sound.
James Earl Jones
#34. The arts have always been an important ingredient to the health of a nation, but we haven't gotten there yet.
James Earl Jones
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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.
James Earl Jones
#39. 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
#40. I agree with my father, Albert Einstein, don't believe every quote you read on the internet.
James Earl Jones
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. The last thing I want to be is a rich black superstar. I just want to act.
James Earl Jones
#46. There haven't been enough profound things written about what being black means and what a black character is. Nobody knows.
James Earl Jones
#47. People who lusted after Marilyn Monroe had no idea she stuttered. It is the secret of her sexiness, actually.
James Earl Jones
#48. My voice is for hire. My endorsement is not for hire. I will do a voice-over, but I cannot endorse without making a different kind of commitment. My politics are very personal and subjective.
James Earl Jones
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. I knew real show business from my father, who had been an actor since he left the world of boxing.
James Earl Jones
#55. 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
#56. Speech is a very important aspect of being human. A whisper doesn't cut it.
James Earl Jones
#57. I really think I ambled through a lot of my life, or ambled from one thing to the other.
James Earl Jones
#58. 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.
James Earl Jones
#59. No one asked me to be an actor, so no one owed me. There was no entitlement.
James Earl Jones
#60. Don't you try and go through life worried if someone had liked you or not. You best make sure that they are doing right by you.
James Earl Jones
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#67. Writing can give full meaning to characters and avoid pure stereotype.
James Earl Jones
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Acting is not about anything romantic, not even fantasy, although you do create fantasy.
James Earl Jones
#72. 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
#73. You cannot be an actor like I am and not have been in some of the worst movies like I have. But I stand before you deeply honored, mighty grateful and just plain gobsmacked.
James Earl Jones
#74. Reading was a big thing, yes. Books were a big thing. But the things that stick out were the newspapers.
James Earl Jones
#75. I don't ever want to be a sentimentalist. I prefer to be a realist. I'm not a romantic really.
James Earl Jones
#76. Your own need to be shines out of any dream or creation you imagine.
James Earl Jones
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. My youngest uncle Randy and I were the first members of our entire family to ever go to college.
James Earl Jones
#81. More and more, when I single out the person out who inspired me most, I go back to my grandfather.
James Earl Jones
#82. 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
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