Tom Hanks Quotes - Page 6

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.

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.

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.

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

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 long as you as an individual... can convince yourself that in order to move forward as best you can you have to be optimistic, you can be described as 'one of the faithful,' one of those people who can say, 'Well, look, something's going to happen! Let's just keep trying. Let's not give up.

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.

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

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.

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!

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

One thing that was amazing about World War II was that everybody signed up for the duration plus six months. Fliers got to leave combat after 25 missions, or 35 missions, but other than that, you were in it. You were part of the great effort, until, oh boy, six months after it was over.

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.

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.

And I'm not apolitical - I'm very specific in my politics. But a lot of the time it's nobody's business unless you're over at my house having dinner.

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.'

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.

My doctor said, 'If you can weigh what you weighed in high school, you'll essentially be healthy and not have Type 2 diabetes.' Well, I'm gonna have Type 2 diabetes, because there is no way I can weigh as much as I did in high school.

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.

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.

No journalist has ever been in my house and no photographs have ever been taken of where I live. I don't parade my family out for display, which is the way it will stay.

There's a small percentage of people who can act. There's a small percentage who get to do this for a living. There's a swath of the population that are able to keep a story in their head and fight all the battles against self-consciousness and the surreal unnaturalness of acting in a movie. The technical aspects you can learn fairly quickly.

'Larry Crowne' is about as bummed out a human being as one can be when he loses his job. What he is able to enjoy is something that may not be available to everybody. But it's about the value of being willing to get and willing to give good advice.

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.