Tom Hanks Quotes
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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.
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By and large, the making of motion pictures is all about, 'Let's ratchet it up.' And I always think, 'We don't need to ratchet this up.' If you do, don't call it 'Captain Phillips' or 'The Maersk Alabama.' Call it something else, and then you have carte blanche to do anything, down to sea serpents and aliens.
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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.
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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."
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I had to say no to 'Fantasy Island' back when I was doing 'Bosom Buddies.'
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The easiest thing to do is to rag on the media, because it isn't doing a very good job right now. It is so much easier to profit from celebrating the worst aspects of ourselves. Acting strikes me as the antithesis of that. We can examine the worst aspects of ourselves, but we don't have to celebrate them.
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I do not want to admit to the world that I can be a bad person. It is just that I don't want anyone to have false expectations. Moviemaking is a harsh, volatile business, and unless you can be ruthless, too, there's a good chance that you are going to disappear off the scene pretty quickly.
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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.
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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.
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I would like to think I've reflected the audience's lives somehow, though it's in this big, false, glamorous arena of movies. I hope people see themselves somehow up on the screen.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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!
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Yeah! I got type-two diabetes! I'm sure there's going to be some media scandal now, saying I got it because I gained and lost weight for movie parts or something - but I doubt that.
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Human beings do things for a reason, even if sometimes it's the wrong reason.
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Saying no to something is actually much more powerful than saying yes.
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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.
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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.
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I am who I am, and I think I have a good nature, by and large. But if someone takes advantage of that good nature, well then, you know, I'm not that nice a guy.
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I think it's better to feel good than to look good.
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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.
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I always wanted to play Lestrade of Scotland Yard 'cause he's a buffoon that gets to wear a uniform. I thought that would be fun.
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A lot of people would flee from what they think is award-show cheesiness, and I don't. I often joke that my speeches are very personal moments that play themselves out in front of billions of people.