Quotes By Ben Affleck

I'm not the most loathsome man in the world. I've dropped to number nine.

My father has positional vertigo, and if he flies he gets really dizzy, so he has to drive out to California, which he does a couple times a year. We talk, but we e-mail mostly.

I've never held myself up particularly high when I had movies that worked, and I never held myself all that low when I had failures.

There's a lot of crazy, weird people out there. It's an ugly world.

It was a dreamlike time for me from December 1997 to March of '98. Before that, I was basically unknown. Then, bang! The starting gun fired, and everybody just started running. It was learn-on-the-job. And there were more opportunities for work than I had time to do them.

My mother gets all mad at me if I stay in a hotel. I'm 31-years-old, and I don't want to sleep on a sleeping bag down in the basement. It's humiliating.

Rumors about me? Calista Flockhart, Pam Anderson, and Matt Damon. That's who I'm dating.

To answer the question, though: I didn't always want to direct. I just liked the idea of it. If a friend was making a short and needed someone who knew screen direction, I would jump in. It would be horrible, but it led to a short, then another, and another. It was like student films.

As an actor, you can steer a scene in another direction by playing it a little differently. And honestly? I like being an actor, and I want to keep having a career.

I remember back when I was a kid there was a comic strip called Plastic Man. His body was elastic and he could make his extremities as long as he wanted. As a youngster I didn't fully appreciate. But I'm now thinking Plastic Man was probably pretty popular with the ladies.

I'm not the type of guy who enjoys one-night stands. It leaves me feeling very empty and cynical. It's not even fun sexually. I need to feel something for the woman and entertain the vain hope that it may lead to a relationship.

After 2000 or so, I started to realize I wanted to be doing something else. I didn't want to be in front of a camera. I was frustrated. I didn't think I would stop acting, but I didn't want to be seen.

The one benefit of having done all kinds of movies as an actor is, you learn the pros and cons of being tempted to do a really big movie because it costs a lot of money.

Marriage hasn't been my thing. But gay people, knock yourselves out!

I've finally learnt how to say, "No comment". To appear in the tabloids is a real learning curve and a steep one at that. You had better learn quick or you get burnt.

The trap for an actor is that you become too successful at what you're trying to do, and you can find yourself stuck there.

I'm sure I can make a movie that doesn't feel like a seventies movie! But the truth is, that's my favorite era in American filmmaking. To me, those were the great years.

I like to think that if I were gay I would be out. Rupert Everett-style.

You have to look also to the media, where you have a vast majority of the loudest and most influential political voices in America media from people who came from the entertainment world.

I kinda see my current position like this: Here's your five minutes in the toy store, so you gotta do all the good movies you can before 'Chuck Woolery' rings the bell.

I like acting for myself as a director. I act and I know that I'll have a chance to have some say in what gets used and that I'll be able to give myself enough takes and be on the same page as myself about how the scene should play.

God help me if I ever do another movie with an explosion in it. If you see me in a movie where stuff is exploding you'll know I've lost all my money.

Sure, I suffered a lot. But it's not like the end of the world and it's not who I am. I lead quite a pleasant life and I'm able to divorce a perceived reality from my actual experience of life.

One guy told me I was a great actor, I just would never be on the cover of a magazine.

When I look up at the screen and see myself I always have to laugh. Not because I think I'm doing a horrible job, quite the contrary, I just feel it's so surreal to feel like one person can entertain so many at one time.

But when I felt like I had something to prove? Then I got up early every morning and worked all day long. I didn't know if I had any more talent than anyone else directing, but I knew I could work hard at it, and so I did.

Every single director-actor I talked to, from Warren Beatty to Clint Eastwood to George Clooney, said the biggest mistake they made is not shooting enough footage of themselves.

You're basically the sum of all the experiences you've ever had, and they're sort of shaken up in you and reproduced in the things you create, and that includes seeing movies.

The first thing that I really understood politically and was old enough to get was the failed assassination attempt on Reagan.

A friend of my mom's was a casting director so, really as kind of a lark, I had a couple of acting jobs that had just enough exposure to give me the option to continue if I wanted to. I followed through with it.