Matt Damon quotes

Born
October 8, 1970, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.

Occupation
Actor, screenwriter.

As a struggling actor, you’re not looking for parts that define you; you’re just looking for work.
– Matt Damon

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.
– Matt Damon

I think marrying somebody who’s not a celebrity, it just takes a lot of the pressure off.
– Matt Damon

If your movies don’t perform, they just stop calling you.
– Matt Damon

I fell in love with a civilian. Not an actress and not a famous actress at that. Because then the attention doesn’t double – it grows exponentially. Because then suddenly everybody wants to be in your bedroom. But I don’t really give them anything.
– Matt Damon

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.
– Matt Damon

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.
– Matt Damon

My wife is my soul mate. I can’t imagine being without her.
– Matt Damon

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.
– Matt Damon

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.
– Matt Damon

I don’t see as many movies as I used to. Or, I should say, as many movies as I would like to.
– Matt Damon

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.
– Matt Damon

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.
– Matt Damon

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.
– 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.
– Matt Damon

I started ‘The Rainmaker’ in August 1996, and I’ve been working consistently ever since. It’s not like I had some grand plan; I keep getting offered jobs so good I can’t say no.
– Matt Damon

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

If you are writing a story and trying to draw an audience to come and hear you tell it, it’s got to in some way relate to them. Who wants to come and hear about your specific problems? It’s not therapy – it’s supposed to be a communal piece of entertainment.
– Matt Damon

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.’
– Matt Damon

It’s better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.
– Matt Damon

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.
– Matt Damon

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.
– Matt Damon

As somebody who makes his living in the movie business and wants to contribute to it, I think that the best chance I have of doing that is just consistently working with great directors.
– Matt Damon

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.
– Matt Damon

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.
– Matt Damon

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

I think what makes a good actor’s director is the same thing that makes a good director. Acting is just one of the trades necessary to make a movie.
– Matt Damon

Right before ‘The Bourne Identity’ came out, I hadn’t been offered a movie in a year.
– Matt Damon

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.
– Matt Damon

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.
– Matt Damon

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.
– Matt Damon

If anybody wanted to photograph my life, they’d get bored in a day.
– Matt Damon

I’ve passed on a lot of huge-money jobs. Money doesn’t enter into the decision-making. If I do a big blockbuster, it’s about how big an audience you’ll get and where you can take them.
– Matt Damon