Jim Parsons Quotes

Oh gravity, thou art a heartless bitch.

Jack Parsons was born Marvel Whiteside Parsons on October 2, 1914 in Los Angeles, California. His father was a captain in the US Army. His name was also Marvel Parsons. That’s right: his father was Captain Marvel.

Throughout the years, Parsons was always asked if he learned anything about physics, or if he felt smarter as a result of playing Sheldon. Jim Parsons: I’ve always had a respect for science and a fascination with certain aspects of it, but I didn’t learn a goddamn thing, I’ll tell you that. Nothing stuck. [Laughs] [Professor] David [Saltzberg] definitely made it easier. He was really helpful in that he was able to usually tell me, “Here’s all you need to know.” For instance, “You’re going to point at this when you say that; you’re going to point at that when you say this.” He was the perfect combination of being scientifically brilliant and being able to talk to a science dodo bird like me. He understood the kind of paint-by-numbers aspect that was necessary for the acting to get to the comedy.

Halloween (known among European pagans as Samhain, pronounced “sa-wen”) is traditionally the day when the dead return to visit the living, similar to the Asian “Wandering Souls” festival mentioned above. It is the day when the gate between the living and the dead is open, a favorite day for evocations of spirits and demons. Candlemas, on the other hand, is the day of “quickening,” when the earth begins to wake from its slumber, a day of promise for the future, of the celebration of fertility, of anticipation for the bounty of the coming year. One could say, therefore, that the first rocket launch on Halloween was an evocation of the daimon of flight, or perhaps in a darker context a breaching of the barrier between this world and the next, an initiatic rending of the veil of the Temple: space being seen as the domain of both the dead and the higher spiritual forces. The actual birth of the American space program on Candlemas is, of course, also an auspicious event, ripe with mythical connotations. It is not the intention of this author to suggest that the selection of these dates was deliberate on the part of von Karman, Parsons, von Braun or the other space engineers. Indeed, by the time of the Explorer I launch in 1958 Parsons himself had already been dead six years. It is the intention, however, to point out these synchronicities as they occur, because they are evidence of deeper, more sinister, forces at work,

Jim Parsons: I don’t even think he’d go all the way down the stairs. He’d lean into the stairs, from that fourth-floor platform, and scream down. I guess we could call that tradition or superstition, or we could call it psychotic. I think that’s between Simon and his good doctors. I can’t speak to that. [Laughs] But in all seriousness, one of the things I think Simon and I connect so deeply about is a certain lifelong struggle with anxiety. Simon Helberg: I generally run in a high octane of nervousness in terms of performing and functioning, so I was always very, very nervous about so much on the show. It got better in time, but I really do idle at an excessive level of anxiety and nerves.

Jim Parsons: Bill Prady called to tell me that there’s winners and there’s losers and there’s somewhere in between. [Laughs] And we were in between. That was a weird time, but also a very fortuitous purgatory, because the months between hearing the first pilot wasn’t being picked up and then waiting to shoot the second pilot is what led me to give up drinking for nine years. I was like, OK, I need to focus, I need to get healthier, so as the date approached that we were going to do the second pilot, I said, “Well, I’m going to clean up my act.” When I knew that we were going to do it again, it slowly began to dawn on me that this is such a unique and special opportunity. I wasn’t so much preparing for success as I was preparing to be able to live with myself if the second pilot didn’t work. Whatever happened, I wanted to know I did everything that I could. I just didn’t want to live with regret.

Judy Parsons: It surprised me because Jim was never that big of a drinker. But I think that was part of his inner dedication, like, I’m gonna give that up, and focus completely on this part. And he did! I was a little shocked the first time he didn’t get a margarita when he came home ’cause in Texas we drink a lot of margaritas. But he stuck to that. Jim Parsons: I wasn’t being so good at focusing myself during that time. I didn’t have any schedule I had to keep. It’s not that anything got out of hand, but I knew that there was work ahead, and I wanted to be ready for it. I wanted to get out of this limbo-ish haze that was going on, but I still didn’t have anything to work on since we were waiting on a new date to shoot the pilot. So it was kind of my own project I could give myself. My thinking was, I’ll still go out and see people, but I’m now going to do it completely sober. I started moving my schedule into more of a “Be up in time for the first hour of the Today show” type of thing as opposed to getting up at the end of Regis and Kelly. And I really liked how I felt once I stopped drinking and started setting a schedule. I kept moving the goalpost, so to speak. I had no intention of going nine years. Instead, I was like, I’m going to wait and see if we get picked up. If we get picked up, then I’ll have a drink! And then from there it was Wait and see if we got picked up for the back nine episodes. And then from there it was Do we get a second season? And then, Can we get Emmy nominations? It was always something to the point it became a little bit of a superstition.

Jim Parsons: Even though I knew that obviously he was game for everything, some part of me felt so inappropriate about putting possibly the most intelligent human being on the planet at that time into a scene in our sitcom. I was really uncomfortable. I thought, “This is not right!” I had been faking how smart I was to play Sheldon by saying the lines other people wrote, but I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about, and now I’m face-to-face with possibly the smartest person on the planet! And even though I knew it wasn’t inappropriate that this was even happening, there was a part of me that felt it somehow was.

While Raj is being the ultimate showman, no one is impressed with his antics—except for Sheldon—who has the look of sheer childlike delight on his face. Jim Parsons: The word gift is what comes to mind, because I loved that the writers allowed this crotchety, stuck-in-his-way character to have these little moments. For it to be Sheldon who had the attitude of Oh! This is wonderful!… that is just the best type of craft work in writing and characters that you can have.

Jim Parsons: I was focused on that wineglass and if Kaley would pull it off, only because those props work about 90 percent of the time and the 10 percent it doesn’t, it takes forever to get right. It’s like, In this major revealing moment, we’re going to depend on a prop gag where we break away a wineglass stem? OK! But it worked! And it’s a good thing too, because there’s nothing harder than a well-timed double take from two of your colleagues looking at you, which is exactly what that moment was built to be. And that is hard to sit through, especially with those two sweet faces.

Jim Parsons: It’s kind of crazy. It’s beyond crazy, actually. There were a few of those through the years, just shocking mentions. And the Nobel is the ultimate.

Jim Parsons and Laurie Metcalf became so close playing son and mother, respectively, that Metcalf came to Parsons’s real-life wedding, and the two still hope to work on another project together.

If you're in livestock, certainly Allan Savory, Jim Gerrish, Stan Parsons, Andre Voisin, and Allan Nation are high on the list. For general farming, J. I. Rodale, Ed Faulkner, Sir Albert Howard, Louis Bromfield, George Henderson, and Charles Walters come to mind. And for cultural anchoring, how about Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Ableman and Fred Kirschenman, Marion Nestle, Joan Gussow, Michael Pollan, and Gary Zimmer. In the culinary world, it's Alice Waters and Dan Barber. In the crop world, it's Colin Seis and Gabe Brown.