Quotes from Matt Damon

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think what's important for kids to know is that your decisions here on earth matter, your behavior matters and how you treat other people matters.

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.

All you have in the end is to look back and like the choices you've made.

History is change happening one person at a time.

The only way I can describe it-at the end of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, you know how his heart grows like five times? Everything is full; it's just full all the time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The very first big photo shoot I ever did was with Bruce Weber. I couldn't believe this guy was taking my picture, so when he told me to get in the bathtub, I just did. It's only now, looking back, that I realise, you don't have to do everything people tell you.

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.