James Earl Jones Quotes

[from "James Earl Jones: Voices and Silences" page 360]: 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.

If you take a villain like Thulsa Doom or Darth Vader and have fun with it, that destroys the credibility of the character.

When I read that part in the script where it said, "Luke, I am your father", I thought, "He's lying. I have to see how they carry this lie out".

[On the Iraq war]: All people have to be prepared. If we are going to be the police, we also have to be the guardians. We can no longer play games. I was not against the war in Bosnia. I was against it taking so long. I was not against the war in Somalia. Again, it took too long, and we didn't finish the job. We should've stayed and finished the job. About this pending war, I just think we should've finished that war the first time.

[On the terrible stutter he suffered from as a young man]: One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter.

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 lose.