Quotes By Matt Damon

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

I think what makes a good actor's director is somebody who understands what I'm doing and is respectful of it, but who also has a vision and is directing me toward their vision in a way that feels productive.

Eventually stardom is going to go away from me. It goes away from everybody and all you have in the end is to be able to look back and like the choices you made.

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.

I started really young, like 12 or 13, and then I started doing school plays. We had a really good drama department, so the kind of drama-geek stigma wasn't really there in my high school.

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 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.

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.

I was never that much a focus of interest that I became a 'thing' at an earlier point in my career. I'm aware of having become a 'thing' now, which doesn't give me a lot of pleasure.

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.

I think it's still hard for me to turn down work if it's really good because for so many years I was so desperate to get a job and couldn't and so it's kind of an anathema for me to turn down work.

Now that I have kids, I'm probably more overprotective than I've ever been. My wife's nickname for me is 'red alert.' I sometimes check just to see if the kids are breathing. But I try not to be a helicopter parent.

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.

I'm always cautious about overstepping any boundaries. At the end of the day, it's a director's medium, and if they don't want to hear from me I just step back.

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

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

I'm becoming far more interested in just functionality and making sure my body is as strong as it can be so I can swing my kids around and not worry about aches and pains.

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.

It's usually the exact same three things which are, the Scripts, the Director and the Role those are the three things I look for and really any two of them, If I get two of them that's usually enough, but definitely those are the things I look for.

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

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.

Still, the change is nearly indescribable - going from total obscurity to walking down a street in New York and having everybody turn and look; to feel the temperature of a room change when I walked in.

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."

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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