Tom Hanks Quotes

Your job as an actor, I guess, is just to make people relate to the character.

For a time, I really thought acting was just impersonating. But impersonation is just big brush strokes, really. What makes acting different is empathy.

If one has no heart, one cannot write for the masses.

No matter what character your play. I feel like whenever anyone is honest and whole and well-written, you're going to be able to connect to that person because we're all kinda made up of the same stuff and I think that's always one of the really powerful things about approaching each individual character and role and film.

I don't like to intellectualize about my acting. I don't sit around and study the pages of a script over and over again. I don't worry whether the period is contemporary or three hundred years ago. Human beings are all alike. The main thing in acting is honesty, to feel the humanity and get to the essence of the character. You can't put anything into a character that you haven't got within you.

Weirdly enough, I don't like to pretend. I try to use things in me, and translate them into the situation and the characters, so it always needs to run through my own veins.

At a certain age you start becoming brave enough to reveal yourself and it's the revealing of who you are that enables you to dig deeper into different characters. You'll get to a point where you can say: 'I can relate to that', 'I know that', 'I don't have to make that up' and that resonates with people in the audience who can tell that you've been there.

I have learned never to judge any of the characters that I portay. Sometimes that is difficult to do because as a human being we tend to make judgements when we find out information about people and situations. In order to bring a character to life, though, I find that I cannot judge her or I won't be true to her.

Very often the characters people respond to best have little parts of reality they can relate to.

In a film, if you can capture what's going on underneath, you can begin to make a connection between the character and the people watching it.

You don't make movies about "men" and "women." You make movies about this guy and this woman and if you get them right, you'll automatically connect with a lot of people.

You can watch someone on-stage cry and cry - but in the audience you feel nothing. It's easy to become indulgent. For me, what's important is the story first.

The character is close to me, except that I haven't lived through those situations, so it's not completely me.

Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.

It's sort of the most important thing for acting, is to listen to the person you're dealing with.

With my writing, what I want to do is humanize the young people I write about.

That's what I love about acting, you get to find little pieces of yourself in every character you play.

For a writer, they say write what you know. As a performer, you find it in yourself, in your heart. You relate to the character. You try to live it, try to have it be real for you.

I'm not saying that I am all of my characters, but for me to bring a character to life, you've got to be able to find your own truth.

It makes it fun. When an actor plays a character, you want what that character wants. Otherwise it doesn't look authentic. So I really want to defeat Jimmy - I mean Jimmy as the character.

I don't feel like I've ever kissed any of the people I have done for acting. That moment didn't exist for you; it existed for that person.

When I'm writing a song, I try to be the character.

It's hard to actually take details from your personal life and apply them a scene because, as much as you can identify with a feeling, you just get muddled. As soon as you start bringing your own stuff in, it's like, 'No, that's not right.' You're playing a different person. You can relate, but you have to leave that stuff at the door.

Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.

When you take on a role, even if the character is somebody that you are dissimilar to, you have to identify with the role and look for an emotional connection even if there is not a biographical one.