Tom Hanks famous quotes

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?
-- Tom Hanks

#Choices #Wake Up #World

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.
-- Tom Hanks

#Real #Black And White #Color

It was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, they meant we were supposed to be together ... and I knew it.
-- Tom Hanks

#Love #Together #Tiny

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.
-- Tom Hanks

#Country #Fighting #Order

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.
-- Tom Hanks

#Country #Impact #World

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."
-- Tom Hanks

#Unhappy #Wake Up #Disaster

A hero is somebody who voluntarily walks into the unknown.
-- Tom Hanks

#Hero #Walks

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.
-- Tom Hanks

#Cutting #Order #Years

Larger-than-life characters make up about .01 percent of the world's population.
-- Tom Hanks

#Character #Larger Than Life #Population

All the kids are gone. It's the greatest thing that has ever happened to Mr. and Mrs. Tom Hanks. I'll tell you that right now. Second greatest after having the kids in the first place. When they go, holy smoke, it's like you're dating again. It's fantastic. Also, we were doing an awful lot of work.
-- Tom Hanks

#Kids #Dating #Awful

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.
-- Tom Hanks

#Character #Thinking #Stories

Every job requires a certain riding of a horse.
-- Tom Hanks

#Horse #Jobs #Riding

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

#Motivational #Way #Honest

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.
-- Tom Hanks

#People #Vision #Trying

There's a difference between solitude and loneliness. I can understand the concept of being a monk for a while.
-- Tom Hanks

#Loneliness #Differences #Solitude

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.
-- Tom Hanks

#Water #Expectations #Decision

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

#Morning #Heaven #Sun

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.
-- Tom Hanks

#Running #People #Competition

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.
-- Tom Hanks

#Couple #Silence #Looks

The Pixar people continuously amaze me. They come up with something that actually looks as though it takes place in this happy, real-world. Every plot line is not just plausible, but oddly authentic. The stories are full of adventure, humor and love. The characters are written with great human dimension. I don't know how they do it but they astound me.
-- Tom Hanks

#Real #Adventure #Character

Reading a script is usually as exciting as reading a boilerplate legal document, so when you read one that makes you feel as if you're seeing the movie, you know it's something different.
-- Tom Hanks

#Reading #Scripts #Different

An animatic is a process where every voice and every sound effect is added to rough animated drawings and it lasts exactly as long as the final movie. So you actually get to go into a screening room with the rest of the cast and you get to see it all at the same time.
-- Tom Hanks

#Voice #Drawing #Long

I've talked to a number of actors who have gained weight for roles, and just the sheer physical toll it puts on one's knees and shoulders - no one wants to do it again. I'm 57 and I don't think I'm going to take on any job or go on vacation again and see to it that I can gain 30 pounds.
-- Tom Hanks

#Jobs #Thinking #Vacation

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.
-- Tom Hanks

#Christmas #House #Watches

And then it was like, wait, you can go to college and study theater? And act in plays? This is almost a racket, you know. And then when the opportunity came along to do it professionally, I thought I'd won the lottery.
-- Tom Hanks

#Opportunity #College #Play

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?
-- Tom Hanks

#Breathing #Tides #Sun

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

#Keys #Secret #Trying

From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It's not a miracle; we just decided to go.
-- Tom Hanks

#Science #Men #Moon

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.
-- Tom Hanks

#Fun #Moving #Jumping

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

#Running #Waiting #Luck

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.
-- Tom Hanks

#Trying #Stories #Possibility

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

#Week

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.
-- Tom Hanks

#Kids #I Love My Family #Film

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.
-- Tom Hanks

#Inspiring #Physics #Combination

Some people go to bed at night thinking, 'That was a good day.' I am one of those who worries and asks, 'How did I screw up today?'
-- Tom Hanks

#Good Day #Night #Thinking

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

#Technology #Stories #Movie Making

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.
-- Tom Hanks

#Stars #Romantic Love #Moon

If you have to have a job in this world, a high-priced movie star is a pretty good gig.
-- Tom Hanks

#Movie #Inspiring #Stars

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

#Color #Theater

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

#Life #Thinking #Feel Good

Eating everything you want is not that much fun. When you live a life with no boundaries, there's less joy. If you can eat anything you want to, what's the fun in eating anything you want to?
-- Tom Hanks

#Fun #Health #Joy

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

#Inspirational #Honesty #Work

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.
-- Tom Hanks

#Lonely #Loneliness #Cinema

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

#Home #Men #Away From Home

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

#Giving Up #Next #Tides

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

#Prejudice #Aids #Social

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.
-- Tom Hanks

#Optimistic #Optimism #Tolerance

I went to college because I didn't have anywhere else to go and it was a fabulous hang. And while I was there I was exposed to this world that I didn't know was possible.
-- Tom Hanks

#College #Fabulous #World

Help publicly. Help privately. Help make sense where sense has gone missing. Help science to solve and faith to soothe. Help, and you will abolish apathy-the void that is so quickly filled by ignorance and evil.
-- Tom Hanks

#Motivation #Ignorance #Evil

If things were easy to find, they wouldn’t be worth finding.
-- Tom Hanks

#Easy #Findings

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?
-- Tom Hanks

#Thinking #Want #Gigs

I will entertain anything; it doesn't matter. You know, it's not obviously about the price, it's not about who, it's kind of about when and what. It's material, that's all.
-- Tom Hanks

#Matter #Kind #Host

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.
-- Tom Hanks

#Spiritual #Men #Years