One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter.
James Earl Jones
More and more, when I single out the person out who inspired me most, I go back to my grandfather.
You don't build a bond without being present.
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.
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.
When you are mute, you become a good listener - it's all one-way. You appreciate the written word. You appreciate the sound.
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.
Once you begin to explain or excuse all events on racial grounds, you begin to indulge in the perilous mythology of race.
Speech is a very important aspect of being human. A whisper doesn't cut it.
Actors never discuss future plans.
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.
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.
I really think I ambled through a lot of my life, or ambled from one thing to the other.
There is not enough magic in a bloodline to forge an instant, irrevocable bond.
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.
My youngest uncle Randy and I were the first members of our entire family to ever go to college.
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.
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.
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.
Your own need to be shines out of any dream or creation you imagine.
People who lusted after Marilyn Monroe had no idea she stuttered. It is the secret of her sexiness, actually.
We children learned responsibility automatically.
The arts have always been an important ingredient to the health of a nation, but we haven't gotten there yet.
There's nothing I would retire for, so I won't retire.
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.
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.'
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 haven't been enough profound things written about what being black means and what a black character is. Nobody knows.
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.
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 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.
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.
Writing can give full meaning to characters and avoid pure stereotype.
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.
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.
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.
So in my junior year, I switched to the drama department.
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?
Reading was a big thing, yes. Books were a big thing. But the things that stick out were the newspapers.
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.
No one asked me to be an actor, so no one owed me. There was no entitlement.
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.
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.
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 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 mean, my people were very, very simple. They were peasant people, you know?
I knew real show business from my father, who had been an actor since he left the world of boxing.
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 don't ever want to be a sentimentalist. I prefer to be a realist. I'm not a romantic really.
