Tom Hanks Quotes

I don't ask for much. I don't ask to be rich, and I don't ask to be famous, and I don't ask to play center field for the New York Yankees. I just want to get married and have a wife, and a house, and I want to have a kid, and I want to go see him be a tooth in the school play!

As a young man, even if I was going to see a play or a film by myself, I didn't feel like I was alone. There was something that was unfolding up there that brought me into it. And I recognised that. For those two hours, it made me feel like I belonged to something really good.

When you're on the open sea and you drop 10, 12 feet and your stomach goes up around your neck - that's when you have problems.

As an actor I am always waiting for my luck to run out.

We are still in the position of waking up and having a choice. Do I make the world better today somehow, or do I not bother?

My favorite traditional Christmas movie that I like to watch is All Quiet on the Western Front. It's just not December without that movie in my house.

My wife and I, we met making a movie. This is not just our job, it's our life. It's what we do naturally whether we're working together or not.

I must say that I do wrestle with the amount of money I make, but at the end of the day what am I gonna say? I took less money so Rupert Murdoch could have more?

I think I'm lucky that I had kids as spread out as much as I did, 'cause my son, my oldest, was born when I was 21. And my youngest is 15 now. He was born when I was 40, you know?

But television, when I was doing it, was all about scoring. You had to make these jokes bang, do whatever you could to make the material really pop. And if it didn't, there was something wrong with the material, or with you.

Are you crying? There's no crying. There's no crying in baseball.

I love what I do for a living, it's the greatest job in the world, but you have to survive an awful lot of attention that you don't truly deserve and you have to live up to your professional responsibilities and I'm always trying to balance that with what is really important.

Saying no to something is actually much more powerful than saying yes.

I have high blood sugars, and Type 2 diabetes is not going to kill me. But I just have to eat right, and exercise, and lose weight, and watch what I eat, and I will be fine for the rest of my life.

In your mid-30s, it's time to start playing guys of compromise. And as you get older, men of bitter compromise

I know what I have to do now, I've got to keep breathing because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?

In New York City real estate parlors took your money and lied to you, drug addicts relieved themselves in plain sight, and the Public Library was closed on Mondays.

For some people, I will be Forrest Gump for the rest of my life. But that's OK; that's a good thing.

My TV show had been cancelled; nothing else had gone anywhere; some alliances I had made petered out and nothing came of them and I was looking at a long, long year ahead of me in which there was no work on the horizon, the phone wasn't ringing. I had two kids, one of them a brand-new baby, and I didn't know if I would be able to keep my house.

Directing is a constant test of your communicative powers. You're constantly trying to explain people your vision of what you want and steer these tiny little details into a cohesive thing.

The truth is that everyone pays attention to who's number one at the box office. And none of it matters, because the only thing that really exists is the connection the audience has with a movie.

The desert, when the sun comes up ... I couldn't tell where heaven stopped and the Earth began.

There isn't any great mystery about me. What I do is glamorous and has an awful lot of white-hot attention placed on it. But the actual work requires the same discipline and passion as any job you love doing, be it as a very good pipe fitter or a highly creative artist.

It just so happens that my body type and my lifestyle gives me a preclusion for high blood sugars.

The more men I kill, the more far away from home I feel
Saving Private Ryan

In the creative process you come to loggerheads and you just have to keep the process moving forward, even if that requires jumping on a plane and flying to London. It's a good thing it's fun, otherwise it would be too much work.

I don't cause riots, but I do cause confusion. People freeze when they spot me.

You have to adhere to a philosophy that the life unexamined is not worth living, because otherwise you're just living from day to day and you don't have any real sense of yourself or where you are.

I'm not interested in doing something edgy with a capital E just so everyone knows, 'Oh, OK, now he's showing us he can do edgy.'

Even if a story has nothing to do with my life, if I can recognise something of myself in the character and think, 'Oh yeah, that's what I'd do ... ' Yeah, that's what I look for.

I had to say no to 'Fantasy Island' back when I was doing 'Bosom Buddies.'

Believing is seeing and seeing is believing.

But I also think all of the great stories in literature deal with loneliness. Sometimes it's by way of heartbreak, sometimes it's by way of injustice, sometimes it's by way of fate. There's an infinite number of ways to examine it.

My wife keeps on telling me my worst fault is that I keep things to myself and appear relaxed. But I am really in a room in my own head and not hearing a thing anyone is saying.

Actors with political views are a dime a dozen.

Help, and you will make a huge impact in the life of the street, the town, the country and our planet. If only one out of four of each one hundred of you choose to help on any given day, in any given cause, incredible things will happen in the world you live in.

Some people are cowards ... I think by and large a third of people are villains, a third are cowards, and a third are heroes. Now, a villain and a coward can choose to be a hero, but they've got to make that choice.

I just know that every man I kill the farther away from home I feel.

May you live as long as you want and not want as long as you live.

E-mail is far more convenient than the telephone, as far as I'm concerned. I would throw my phone away if I could get away with it.

There is something basic about protecting land by taking it off the market. People should be able to enjoy where they live while at the same time protect the plants and animals around them.

I'm lucky enough to be able to make only movies I'm interested in seeing. That has to be an instinctive thrust. The audience knows when you're faking it. They can hang any kind of moniker they want on me.

There's this misconception that the Navy is this cruise ship, and you get to go out and sail around, and every now and then, you have to swab the deck. But, no, it is a very impressive group of young people that live at sea, in this place that's very uncomfortable. They exude a pride that is well-deserved.

I would not want to live in a country that would have me as a leader in any sort of political bent.

I come from the school of That Horse is Not Dead.

There was a period of time in Los Angeles when I wondered if I was just going to lose everything.

I think it's better to feel good than to look good.

The filmmakers aren't running the studios anymore. Sometimes people who like films are making them, but by and large, they have to go report quarterly earnings and all that stuff. The competition is so huge that it's very hard to get people to show up to see any movie in the theater, much less an original one that isn't a version of something else they saw.

I know the Pope is opposed to the use of condoms. All I can say is, I am a spiritual man and I've been happily married for 21 years. I don't even know what a condom is anymore.

The nature of the movies is different than it was five years ago, and they're all driven by the possibilities of CGI, which means you can make anything happen on screen that you can possibly desire.

It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.

Shake it off and move on.

When I work, a lot of times I have to lose weight, and I do that, but in my regular life I was not eating right, and I was not getting enough exercise. But by the nature of my diet and that lifestyle - boom! The end result was high blood sugars that reach the levels where it becomes Type 2 diabetes. I share that with a gajillion other people.

I am who I am, and I think I have a good nature, by and large. But if someone takes advantage of that good nature, well then, you know, I'm not that nice a guy.

Truth is, I'll never know all there is to know about you just as you will never know all there is to know about me. Humans are by nature too complicated to be understood fully. So, we can choose either to approach our fellow human beings with suspicion or to approach them with an open mind, a dash of optimism and a great deal of candour.

I'm not a smart man, but I know what love is.

I've made over 20 movies, and 5 of them are good.

If they could offer up a way to go to the moon that wouldn't kill you, I'd sign up.

Human beings do things for a reason, even if sometimes it's the wrong reason.

Oprah Winfrey today you are surrounded by nothing but love.

I love my family and I love my kids, but when the moments come, it's not as though you can just substitute your own life with what you're doing on film. You have to go to some other place where it's bigger than your own life.

College isn't necessary for everybody and it's only from what you put into it what you go there for.

If you're funny, if there's something that makes you laugh, then every day's going to be okay.

Never give up because you never know what the tide will bring in the next day.

Movie-making is telling a story with the best technology at your disposal.

Childish, selfish, immature - that's right, I am. But do you know how much money I make for thinking this way?

You cannot look up at the night sky on the Planet Earth and not wonder what it's like to be up there amongst the stars. And I always look up at the moon and see it as the single most romantic place within the cosmos.

The power of the individual is as powerful as the universe is infinite.

I'm glad I didn't have to fight in any war. I'm glad I didn't have to pick up a gun. I'm glad I didn't get killed or kill somebody. I hope my kids enjoy the same lack of manhood.

Audiences crave something they've never seen before. That's what they want. They want to be dazzled. They want to go in either to have their expectations blown out of the water, or have no expectations and are dazzled by the decisions that we [filmmakers] made.

At the end of the day it's got to be a good movie, it's got to be a funny movie, and it's got to make people think, 'Hey, I couldn't have spent my time any better.'

Now, learning how to make a movie is something you can figure out in about an afternoon. The physics of it, the marks, the lights, etc. What's hard to do is to suspend your own feelings of self consciousness. The natural actors can do that; they can become part of a characterization and learn how to maintain it.

You learn more from getting your butt kicked than getting it kissed.

Mama always had a way of explaining things so I could understand them.

Tweeting is like sending out cool telegrams to your friends once a week.

Mama always said, dying was a part of life. I sure wish it wasn't.

I want to have a good time myself. I don't want to dread going to work no matter what the gig is. I think, selfishly, I will make sure that I have a good time; how about that?

Once humankind has been some place and found it
entrancing, they always go back, I think in the history of the
human race, the moon has been the first place we've gone to and said,
'OK, we don't need to go back there again.

When I was growing up, everybody in charge, my parents and teachers, had all survived the war, and they talked about the war like it was the Kraken - you know, this huge beast that roamed the earth during their formative years.

Hey, I got an idea, let's go to the movies. I wanna go to the movies, I want to take you all to the movies. Let's go and experience the art of the cinema. Let's begin with the Scream Of Fear, and we're gonna have it haunt us for the rest of our lives. And then let's go see The Great Escape, and spend our summer jumping our bikes, just like Steve McQueen over barb wire. And then let's catch The Seven Samurai for some reason on PBS, and we'll feel like we speak Japanese because we can read the subtitles and hear the language at the same time. And then let's lose sleep the night before we see 2001: A Space Odyssey because we have this idea that it's going to change forever the way we look at films. And then let's go see it four times in one year. And let's see Woodstock three times in one year and let's see Taxi Driver twice in one week. And let's see Close Encounters of the Third Kind just so we can freeze there in mid-popcorn. And when the kids are old enough, let's sit them together on the sofa and screen City Lights and Stage Coach and The Best Years of Our Lives and On The Waterfront and Midnight Cowboy and Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show and Raging Bull and Schindler's List… so that they can understand how the human condition can be captured by this amalgam of light and sound and literature we call the cinema.

My job has always been to hold a mirror up to nature.

Yeah! I got type-two diabetes! I'm sure there's going to be some media scandal now, saying I got it because I gained and lost weight for movie parts or something - but I doubt that.

Everybody has something that chews them up and, for me, that thing was always loneliness. The cinema has the power to make you not feel lonely, even when you are.

The same way that I know that I'll never do a movie as good or as celebrated as 'Forrest Gump,' I know that I'll never do a movie as bad as 'Bonfire of the Vanities.'

There's no substitute for a great love who says, 'No matter what's wrong with you, you're welcome at this table.

By and large, the making of motion pictures is all about, 'Let's ratchet it up.' And I always think, 'We don't need to ratchet this up.' If you do, don't call it 'Captain Phillips' or 'The Maersk Alabama.' Call it something else, and then you have carte blanche to do anything, down to sea serpents and aliens.

The only way you can truly control how you are seen is by being honest all the time.

In the 1998 Oscars, I found myself in the bathroom in a stall, next to Tom Selleck. So I leaned over and I said 'looks like we're a couple of peeing Toms. His angry silence is something I'll never forget.

If things were easy to find, they wouldn't be worth finding.

There was nothing to react to except wind and trees [in Cast Away]. It was like making a silent movie.

If I was to direct Ron Howard, I guarantee you, I would put him through a living hell every day. I would demand so much of him. We wouldn't quit until he leaves the set crying. Weeping! Spent!

It's just as hard ... staying happily married as it is doing movies.

I know that my work in this case is magnified by the fact that the streets of heaven are too crowded with angels. We know their names. They number a thousand for each one of the red ribbons that we wear here tonight. They finally rest in the warm embrace of the gracious creator of us all, a healing embrace that cools their fevers, that clears their skin, and allows their eyes to see the simple, self-evident commonsense truth that is made manifest by the benevolent creator of us all.

I always wanted to play Lestrade of Scotland Yard 'cause he's a buffoon that gets to wear a uniform. I thought that would be fun.

Repertory theater is all about being part of the whole, one of the many colors in this vast palette.

You don't necessarily go in to talk to the person to try to find some secret key to the lock.

If you look at romantic comedies as pieces of commerce, the audience is looking for wish fulfillment.

If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. It's the hard that makes it great.

When I was 21 years old, I had a job playing Santa Claus in a shopping centre in Sacramento. I was rail thin, so it's not like I was a traditional Santa Claus even then. I had a square stomach; that was the shape of the sofa cushion that I had stuffed into my pants.

The nature of motion capture is only going to work for certain films. It's not going to put any other type of movies out of business.