Top 120 Tom Hanks Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “As an actor I am always waiting for my luck to run out.”

— Tom Hanks

52. “You don’t necessarily go in to talk to the person to try to find some secret key to the lock.”

— Tom Hanks

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

— Tom Hanks

54. “Oprah Winfrey today you are surrounded by nothing but love.”

— Tom Hanks

55. “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.’”

— Tom Hanks

56. “College isn’t necessary for everybody and it’s only from what you put into it what you go there for.”

— Tom Hanks

57. “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

58. “But I also think all of the great stories in literature deal with loneliness. Sometimes it’s by way of heartbreak, sometimes it’s by way of injustice, sometimes it’s by way of fate. There’s an infinite number of ways to examine it.”

— Tom Hanks

59. “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.”

— Tom Hanks

60. “But actors with political views are a dime a dozen.”

— Tom Hanks

61. “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

62. “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

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

— Tom Hanks

64. “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

65. “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.”

— Tom Hanks

66. “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.’”

— Tom Hanks

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

— Tom Hanks

68. “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.”

— Tom Hanks

69. “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.”

— Tom Hanks

70. “It just so happens that my body type and my lifestyle gives me a preclusion for high blood sugars.”

— Tom Hanks

71. “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.”

— Tom Hanks

72. “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.”

— Tom Hanks

73. “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

74. “Every job requires a certain riding of a horse.”

— Tom Hanks

75. “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.”

— Tom Hanks

76. “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.”

— Tom Hanks

77. “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

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

— Tom Hanks

79. “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!”

— Tom Hanks

80. “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

81. “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

82. “I think I’m lucky that I had kids as spread out as much as I did, ’cause my son, my oldest, was born when I was 21. And my youngest is 15 now. He was born when I was 40, you know?”

— Tom Hanks

83. “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.”

— Tom Hanks

84. “But look, I was born in 1956, the peak year for births in US history. I think I’m very representative of many of the thought processes my generation have been through and, by and large, people of my age have had their imprint planted on the consciousness of western society for a long time.”

— Tom Hanks

85. “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.”

— Tom Hanks

86. “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.”

— Tom Hanks

87. “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.”

— Tom Hanks

88. “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.”

— Tom Hanks

89. “I have gone through so many examinations of what a hero is, between the World War II stuff and the astronaut stuff.”

— Tom Hanks

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

— Tom Hanks

91. “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.”

— Tom Hanks

92. “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.”

— Tom Hanks

93. “Acting still rings my bell as much as it did in high school. Plus, I can now indulge my interests as a producer as well. My work is more fun than fun but, best of all, it’s still very scary. You are always walking some kind of high wire.”

— Tom Hanks

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

— Tom Hanks

95. “If you look at romantic comedies as pieces of commerce, the audience is looking for wish fulfillment.”

— Tom Hanks

96. “Human beings do things for a reason, even if sometimes it’s the wrong reason.”

— Tom Hanks

97. “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

98. “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.”

— Tom Hanks

99. “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!”

— Tom Hanks

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

— Tom Hanks