Quotes by Matt Damon

"I'm not Brad Pitt or George Clooney. Those guys walk into a room and the room changes. I think there's something more... not average, but everyman about me."

"Bond is part of the system. He's an imperialist and a misogynist, and he laughs at killing people, and he sits there slugging martinis. It'll never be the same thing as this, because Bourne is a guy who is against the establishment, who is paranoid and on the run. I just think fundamentally they're just very different things."

"It's just better to be yourself than to try to be some version of what you think the other person wants."

"I'd had people say, 'You'll enjoy being famous for a week, and you'll never enjoy it again'. But I don't think I had that week. I may have been working and missed that moment."

"I found myself getting more publicly shy when the gala events and big crowds started. Some people embrace it. To me, it's not worth enough to risk my private life being public."

"If anybody wanted to photograph my life, they'd get bored in a day."

"If anybody wanted to photograph my life, they'd get bored in a day. 'Heres Matt at home learning his lines. Here's Matt researching in aisle six of his local library'. A few hours of that and they'd go home."

"My parents divorced when I was young but I was brought up in two really loving households. I didn't have a contentious relationship with my mom or dad."

"As a struggling actor, you're not looking for parts that define you; you're just looking for work."

"That's the way this business works: if your movies do well at the box office, you will be offered more movies. It doesn't matter if you're a nice guy or you're a prick. If your movies do well, there's a job waiting for you in Hollywood. It's not any more complicated than that."

"I'd love to be a dad. I hope I'd be great at it. That's every man's fear, yet his most important job."

"I honestly if I get a vacation I'm gonna go and sit on my couch in New York cause that's the one place I haven't been for a very long time."

"Success is not something I've wrapped my brain around. If people go to those movies, then yes, that's true, big-time success. If not, it's much ado about nothing."

"There are people who appear in the magazines and I don't know who they are. I've never seen anything they've done and their careers are over already. They're famous for maybe 10 minutes. Real careers, I think, take a long time to unfold."

"The thing that I like about Germany is that Germans are so much like us. It's not like going to some other countries, where the differences are overwhelming and you walk around in a fog. Germans are so similar to Americans."

"It's better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody."

"Some people get into this business and they're so afraid to lose anything. They try to protect their position like clinging to a beachhead. These actors end up making really safe choices. I never wanted to go that route. If I go down, I'm going down swinging."

"I never wanted to do the same kind of movies over and over anyway, so my theory on it all is I'm just gonna try and dodge the label and keep doing what I am doing."

"The values that I have are the values I was raised with, from where I'm from, which is a middle-class place. So that informs everything about me, my politics and all that stuff. I mean, politically, I vote against my own self-interest at every election. I actively ask these people to raise my taxes."

"My mother is a professor of early childhood education. When I was two she would say she knew I was going to be an actor."

"If your movies don't perform, they just stop calling you."

"I love shooting, when the character is interesting and the script is interesting, but the research beforehand is really fun. The whole process makes me anxious and restless, and I have trouble sleeping, just trying to figure out the character."

"Fame is really strange. One day you're not famous, and then the next day you are, and the odd thing is that you know intellectually that nothing in the world is different. What mattered to you yesterday are the same things that matter today, and the rules all still apply - yet everyone looks at you differently."

"For Ripley I learned to play some songs on the piano, and I never really played them again."

"I've been left alone, even by the paparazzi, because what sells is sex and scandal. Absent that, they really don't have much interest in you. I'm still married, still working, still happy."

"Now I feel I have an unspoken deal with the paparazzi: 'I won't do anything publicly interesting if you agree not to follow me.'"

"My wife is my soul mate. I can't imagine being without her."

"I didn't grow up with great privilege, nor did I grow up wanting for anything. I was a middle-class kid and, relative to the rest of the world, that's great wealth."

"I believe a solid, really strong middle-class is the key to making the country in the best way."

"As for poker, I've stayed away from that, even though when I was in Vegas for Ocean's Eleven, I would get accosted by these guys begging me to play. They just want to take my money. They see me, think 'actor' and see some easy money."