Tom Hanks Quotations | Page 2

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

In the early days you have a tendency to intellectualize, but you're really just trying to sound smart and score with the chicks.

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

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

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

Even the simplest choice can make a jaw-dropping difference in our world.

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

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

I've worked with people who are much further to the left than I am and much further to the right than I am. At the end of the day, who gives a ... . Good for you. This is America. Vote your conscience.

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

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.

Life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're gonna get." Number Six in the Top Ten Most Famous Movie Quotes. -The Guinness Book of Film

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.

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?

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every job requires a certain riding of a horse.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

Houston, we have a problem.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

I had to keep breathing. Even though there was no reason to hope... I stayed alive. I kept breathing. And one day my logic was proven all wrong because the tide came in, and gave me a sail. And now, here I am. Im back... Because now i know what I have to do now. I have to keep breathing. Because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?

This is what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination.

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

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.

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.

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.

Dear God, thank you for my life. I forgot how big and wonderful it is.

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

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.

Shake it off and move on.

The cinema has the power to make you not feel lonely, even when you are.

But actors with political views are a dime a dozen.

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.

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

I don't follow football, I just love the name Aston Villa. Here in England you have other footballing entities like Manchester and Arsenal and Chelsea

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.

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

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?

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

Believing is seeing and seeing is believing.

We are all God's animated cartoons.

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

Oprah Winfrey today you are surrounded by nothing but love.

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

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.

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'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.

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!

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

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

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.