12 Tom Hanks Quotes at 70, Like the Thank-You to Rita Wilson He Repeated 25 Years Later

In January 2001, while promoting Cast Away, Hanks was asked whether he ever thinks about the road not taken, or the road ahead. “Oh God. You don’t think about that. That’s not the important stuff,” he told The Guardian’s Danny Leigh.

The reporter wrote that Hanks looked at his bottle, then his spoon, then back at him. Then he finished the thought: “The important stuff is who else is in the car.”

In the same 2001 interview, Hanks was asked how he explains his success. His answer: “rather than being able to say yes to the right things, I think I’ve been able to say no to the wrong things.”

That is hard, he said, “because a lot of the time the story is good, the people are great, and it’s a nice chunk of change they offer you. But if it’s not right, it’s not right.” His conclusion: “I think that’s the only way we really get to define ourselves — not so much by what we say yes to, as what we say no to.”

Hanks spent two years at Chabot College, a community college in Hayward, California. When Harvard gave him an honorary doctorate in May 2023, he opened his speech by thanking everyone who studied where he did.

Two weeks earlier, on NPR, he had used the same five words for life itself: “our own individual battle against one damn thing after another.”

“On behalf of all of us who studied for two years at Chabot Community College in Hayward, California, two semesters at California State University, Sacramento, and for 45 years at the School of Hard Knocks earning a bachelor of arts degree in one damn thing after another, thank you.”

When Hanks won best actor for Forrest Gump in March 1995, he ended his speech with his wife. “I am standing here because the woman I share my life with has taught me and demonstrates for me every day just what love is,” he said, according to the Academy’s speech archive.

Twenty-five years later, accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes with his family in the front row, he said almost the same thing: “A wife who is fantastic in every way and who has taught me what love is,” as TODAY reported. They married in 1988. On his 70th birthday this July, she wrote on Instagram: “Happy Birthday, love of my life!”

After high school in 1974, Hanks had “lousy SAT scores” and no money for tuition, so he went to Chabot College “because it accepted everyone and was free.” In a 2015 New York Times essay, quoted by Entertainment Tonight, he looked back at his classes.

“I nearly failed zoology, my fruit flies by neglect nearly passed away from neglect, but got lucky in an English course, ‘The College Reading Experience,’” he wrote. Years later, he drove past the campus with one of his kids and summed up his two years there: “That place made me what I am today.”

Hanks told this one to Harvard’s class of 2023, in the speech Harvard posted with its own captions. “Now, a kooky uncle once said to me, ‘We should all stay in school as long as we can because the moment we graduate, we have to work every day for the rest of our lives.’ Now that uncle was a bit bitter, but he was not wrong.”

Then he kept going: “We all get to complain about the man and we all have debts we gotta pay and we’re all entitled to a day off to lay about.”

In May 2023, NPR’s A Martínez asked Hanks about his novel on the making of a superhero movie. “If someone’s going to ask me, what is the surefire way that I can get to Hollywood? I would have two answers. One, as Bette Davis said, take Fountain, you know?” It’s a joke about a real street that runs through Hollywood. “But the other one is solve problems.”

In the same Harvard speech, Hanks borrowed the opening lines of the old Superman TV show and pointed them at the graduates and their families.

“We all have special powers and abilities far beyond the reach of other mortals,” he said. “Some of us can repair a screen door with ease. Some of us can take care of a five year old kid and a toddler for 24 hours a day and never stop loving them.”

In 1977, Hanks was an intern at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, his first professional job. After a night when the young actors partied too much, the director told them their job was to show up on time, know the text and have a head full of ideas.

Accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes in January 2020, Hanks called it the “greatest lesson a young actor could possibly get.” He added: “Showing up on time is one of the greatest liberating acts you can give yourself in a movie.”

In the same Golden Globes speech, Hanks gave credit to the actors he has worked with. “You’re a dope if you don’t steal from everybody you’ve ever worked with,” he said, as Rolling Stone reported.

“And I have stolen from the likes of people who only need one name. Like Meryl, like Denzel, like Antonio, like Meg, like Julia, like Sally Field — even though that’s two names, it’s still one.”

Hanks has collected typewriters since the 1970s, and in 2017 he published Uncommon Type, a book of short stories in which every story has something to do with one. He told NPR’s David Greene that the machine is “a hex in my brain,” built to do one thing perfectly: “to translate the thoughts in your head down to paper.”

Then he added: “Short of carving words into stone with a hammer and chisel, not much is more permanent than a paragraph or a sentence or a love letter or a story typed on paper.”

For the 2024 film Here, digital effects let Hanks and Robin Wright play their characters across several decades. Before the premiere, he told People he has no problem with aging. “It’s good to look young again,” he said, as CNN reported. “It’s not great to be young again.”

The hardest ages to play, he said, were 35 and 42, “when the aging process just begins to kick in and you no longer are able to spring up off a couch.” And then: “I’d rather be as old as I am.”