Top 206 Quotes & Sayings by Tom Hanks - Page 3

If you can feel like a good man in your 40s, you can feel like a better man in your 50s, a Superman in your 60s, and maybe a Spider-Man in your 70s.

All directors should have to act and all actors should have to direct, so that they can understand all these key things that come into play with whether you can meet your day.

If I have no connection with the character, then it's all fake - it's just blah, blah, blah.

Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as 'yellow, slant-eyed dogs' that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what's going on today?

It's not a mid-life crisis. It's a mid-life disaster. A mid-life crisis is when you wake up with everything and you go "I have everything but I'm still unhappy."

Without question, we make choices - and those choices have consequences. So can you control your own destiny? To a degree, certainly. Must you have faith in serendipity? Without question, you'd better. Otherwise you're foolish.

Let's not pretend there isn't a huge industry driven by the choices made by editors and writers who decide what a story is.

But actors with political views are a dime a dozen.

The "Toy Story" films accomplish what timeless classics aim for - innocent characters who face an endless trail of adventures.

I've made quite a number of movies like Castaway and a few others where I'm the only guy in the movie and the only place to be is right next to the camera in costume ready to go in order to get it. The years, and more specifically probably the four months prior to beginning shooting, is where the big preparation is that the director does because I knew we were going to get on the set. And the good news is, if you're the boss, if it ain't good, you don't use it. You just cut it out.

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.

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.

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

Shake it off and move on.

The prejudice surrounding AIDS exacts a social death which precedes the actual physical one.

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 gotta keep breathing. Because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?

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

Hold the mirror up to nature. Human behavior is worthy of examination and celebration.

I was never intimidated by change. I was like an army brat who had lived all around the world.

The average movie set is the least political arena on Earth. Nobody bothers talking about politics because, one, we all love the job so much. You don't talk about current events. You talk about old show business stories and whether or not there's gonna be French onion dip at the craft services table that day.

There's such an advantage to being involved in the day-to-day details of each other's lives. It's a marvelous fabric to exist in.

It was incredibly cheesy set with torches [TV's Survivor] - it looked like the lobby of the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland. And here as some guy pulling names out of a coconut, and I said, 'This is the thing that has made American mass media stop in their tracks?

My work is really a blast. When it stops being a blast, then it ain't no fun no more!

It's difficult to say no sometimes. I often hear, "They'll really take care of you," or "Someone else is going to take the role if you don't play it." Some of the best advice I ever received was to always ask myself: Am I going to kill myself if somebody else takes this role? The answer is almost always no.

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

When you try to bring a story to life, it starts in your head and you see possibilities for it, but it's just one damn thing after another.

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.

The pleasure of working with somebody who's an actor is they don't waste time with stuff that doesn't matter.

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.

As a boy Id often spend my days biking on riverbeds and arroyos and come home exhausted. I realize now how much I took for granted having the natural world so close at hand. It wasnt until I moved away, first to New York and then to Los Angeles, that I realized how much I missed the outdoors.

I start at square one with every role. If I let myself feel pressure, it would crush me. 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. Sometimes that's a palpable thing, but other times it's not. No actor has control of that. All you can control is your own passion for doing the work in the first place.

Being politically correct means always having to say you're sorry. Believe me, the power and pleasure and the emotion of this moment is a constant speed of light.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I'm not looking for anything. If you start looking for something specific, then you take providence right out of it. You can't completely control it. Otherwise you'd make the same kind of movie over and over again, which some people say I've done.

When you're going to try and have people talk in a room and actually reflect life as we know it and have people recognize themselves and their own street and their own house in it, well then you're aiming for the high country and it's a much bigger gamble. You can interview all the marketing gurus and the people in charge of, you know, the people you gotta fight with in order to get your seats here, and they all talk about release dates and counterprogramming. At the end of the day, it's gotta be a good movie.

Help and you will abolish apathy-the void that is so quickly filled by ignorance and evil.

Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me wanna buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address. On the other hand, this not knowing has its charms.

Before you go into what is essentially a competition, you have to have that confidence. You have to ask yourself, "Are they looking for a guy my height? My age? I've got a shot." And if there are nine guys auditioning and they're all gorgeous, I have an advantage, because gorgeous guys are a dime a dozen. But if they need someone else - like a goofy guy with bad hair who is just okay - then that's me. And finally, the other 2 percent who audition are geniuses that I could never touch.

Motion pictures are just beginning to live up to their true potential of being immersive experience - going from beyond black and white flickering images to fully immersive 3D color high-definition. You don't even know where the real world starts and the fake world begins. And yet, none of that's going to matter unless the story and the emotions that they allow us to become invested in are something that we can recognize. Pixar is able to do this in ways that almost defies speculation.

Oprah Winfrey today you are surrounded by nothing but love.

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

I don't parade my family out for display, which is the way it will stay. Yet I have a reputation for being cooperative with the press. That's because when I do give an interview, I'm willing to tell the truth about what I do for a living and how goofy it is sometimes - and how volatile it can also be.

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.

I try to do what I call the three E's - educate, entertain, and enlighten. If you don't entertain, no one will show up. But you also have to educate, because people want to discover specific things about a world unlike their own - whether it's how hard it is to go to the moon or how scary it is to be on Omaha Beach.

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

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.

Mass-market movies have become about one thing. They kind of declare themselves right off the bat. . . . But when I go to see (a film), I want to be surprised. I want to see something I never expected. And when you get that, it should be celebrated.

We're part of a greater humanity and we can actually affect the world by the choices we make once we leave the theater.

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!

Making a film is to make sure that everybody looks forward to coming to work.

If not for John Adams leading a revolution against Great Britain...This would be the BAFTAs.

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

I've been doing a pale imitation of Bill Murray for most of my career.

I am a lay historian by nature. I seek out an empirical reflection of what truth is. I sort of want dates and motivations and I want the whole story. But I've always felt, unconsciously, that all human history is that connection from person to person to person, event to event to event, and from idea to idea.