Tom Hanks - biography

1956-

Biography

Tom Hanks is best-known for the following films:

Tom Hanks Quotes

“Prior to Saving Private Ryan I never worked with men. I was always working with some babe, and it was always about falling in love, and it just got turned around. I’m not looking for any particular kind of story. I wait until it comes across my desk.”

“When you’ve played Montano in Othello a couple of times, let me tell you, you never want to do it again. I mean, five months being the guy who runs out at the start of the second act and says, ‘What, from the cape, can you discern at seas?’ It begins to grate.”

“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.’”

“I’ve made over 20 movies, and five of them are good.”

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

“It’s just as hard... staying happily married as it is doing movies.”

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

“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.”

“That’s what’s nice about directing a film and having it done: There’s nothing more I can do about it. It’s done. That’s it. All I can do is let it go and hope that people are kind to it.”

“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.”

“What we’re doing with Band of Brothers is trying to put it into human terms, so it is not just a flickering, black and white myth on a screen, it is a resonant story. I want the audience to recognize themselves in these men. They’re not just mythic heroes.”

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

“There’s a difference between solitude and loneliness. I can understand the concept of being a monk for a while.”

“Growing up in northern California has had a big influence on my love and respect for the outdoors. When I lived in Oakland, we would think nothing of driving to Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz one day and then driving to the foothills of the Sierras the next day.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I had three mothers, five grammar schools and ten houses by the time I was ten.”

“I understand the concept of optimism. But I think with me what you get is a lack of cynicism.”

“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.”

“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.’”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“My kid could get a bad X-ray and I could get a call from the doctor saying I have something growing in my bum and that would change my perspective on everything instantaneously, on what is and what is not important.”

“The most accurate representation of how I feel is that I’m incredibly lucky to be working in this structure where people get paid millions to read the news on TV. And, yes, it is insane. And there is nothing I can say beyond acknowledging my immense good fortune, and being aware that I’m blessed, and aware that it isn’t going to last forever.”

“The year I was born, 1956, was the peak year for babies being born, and there are more people essentially our age than anybody else. We could crush these new generations if we decided too.”

“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.”

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

Filmography

The Actor