Top 100 Ben Affleck Quotes
#1. I've seen high and lows. When things go well that doesn't make me feel like some genius. Nor will I allow the next disappointment to make me feel like a complete failure.
Ben Affleck
#2. I didn't do anything for two years but work on 'Gone Baby Gone,' and it was miserable and hard, but at the end? It is a good movie. I liked it very much. If it had been dismissed and deemed worthless, it would been definitely devastating. But that didn't happen.
Ben Affleck
#3. When you hire great actors, you're lucky, so you just try to create an atmosphere where they can succeed and relax and take risks. You're happy that you get to watch them at the monitor and that your name is on the director's chair.
Ben Affleck
#4. Everyone's entitled to express their political beliefs. I don't presume to tell anybody who to vote for. I am comfortable telling people what my opinions are.
Ben Affleck
#5. I like the incongruity of how in Iran, these people we think of as being revolutionaries or fanatics or whatever are just as aware of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader as our people are back home.
Ben Affleck
#7. I'm terrible in the kitchen. I was mostly raised by my mother and she could cook, so I never perfected that skill. If I had to count on my own cooking to survive, I'd probably be thinner.
Ben Affleck
#8. It wasn't my childhood fantasy to work with Truffaut or be in obscure films. I like Midnight Run better than I like The Bicycle Thief. It was films like Die Hard and Bladerunner that made me want to be an actor.
Ben Affleck
#9. Narcissism is the part of my personality that I am the least proud of, and I certainly don't like to see it highlighted in everybody else I meet.
Ben Affleck
#10. I'm always described as 'cocksure' or 'with a swagger', and that bears no resemblance to who I feel like inside. I feel plagued by insecurity.
Ben Affleck
#11. 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.
Ben Affleck
#12. People ascribe a certain kind of silliness to the movie business. Everybody feels like, "In the movies, they do crazy stuff."
Ben Affleck
#13. I really feel that's part of why audiences go to movies now is to take you to a world you have no access to, whether it's the world of Avengers or Middle-earth or bars in Boston you would be afraid to go into. You see characters there - they aren't hobbits but they're close.
Ben Affleck
#14. If you want to be able to use the powers of Flash and Wonder Woman and Cyborg, you have to have bad guys who are up to snuff and give them what they can really kind of get their cars out on the track and open up the accelerator a little bit.
Ben Affleck
#16. I recognize that Hollywood is not about seniority. Often it's not even a meritocracy. It's about what you did yesterday. You have a couple of misses, and suddenly it's impossible to find a hit. So the swings are gigantic. But I've always understood it as such, and navigated it as such.
Ben Affleck
#17. 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.
Ben Affleck
#18. I have three women in the house. I get to be wrong three times a day.
Ben Affleck
#19. Will: I read your book last night.
Sean: So you're the one.
Ben Affleck
#20. Just because a lot of people know something nominal doesn't make it important. A lot of people know what a pencil sharpener is, but that doesn't make it the most important invention of the 20th century.
Ben Affleck
#21. I really think that everybody would like to be an actor. Why wouldn't they? It's great work if you can get it. The one thing that prevents most people from saying, 'I'm just gonna go to Hollywood!' is that it seems unrealistic.
Ben Affleck
#22. I've got to work really hard and I know exactly what I've achieved because I know how hard I've worked, and I make sure to work as hard as I absolutely possibly can, because I know that's the only shot I have at being successful.
Ben Affleck
#23. No actor forgets the times he couldn't get a job. I think everyone doing this operates from that fear. You don't want that momentum to stop when you get it
Ben Affleck
#24. 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.
Ben Affleck
#25. Nobody I represent is pretending to be the pope or a role model for young people. People have to live their lives. They have the right to smoke if they want.
Ben Affleck
#26. When you are in your 20s and you're not married with kids, you're having fun. But when you're in your 30s and you're not married and don't have kids, you begin to develop a Peter Pan complex. As you grow older, you have more responsibilities and you have to step up to them.
Ben Affleck
#27. There's something really great and romantic about being poor and sleeping on couches.
Ben Affleck
#28. No matter how much you change, you still got to pay the price for the things you've done.
Ben Affleck
#29. I hate the whole reluctant sex-symbol thing. It's such bull. You see these dudes greased up, in their underwear, talking about how they don't want to be a sex symbol.
Ben Affleck
#30. Matt and I have set a date. Matt and I will tie the knot New Years Day in the town of Swampscott, Massachusetts. Reserve your hotel rooms now. I will be having a gay marriage.
Ben Affleck
#31. One of the things it channelled in me was that experience that I'd had of wearing a big red leather thing on my upper torso in Daredevil with a mask I couldn't see through and an outfit that completely inhibited movement, feeling humiliated and like a fool. I just recalled that.
Ben Affleck
#32. I feel things more deeply ... anything to do with kids. It just makes a big difference in my life ... Having a child is like taking the deepest core vulnerable aspect of myself, reaching in and taking it outside of my body.
Ben Affleck
#34. My movies are unadorned, they're not particularly fancy, I think they're kind of workmanlike in some ways, focusing on the writing and the acting.
Ben Affleck
#35. 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.
Ben Affleck
#36. The first day of 'The Town' was one of the most satisfying days of my career.
Ben Affleck
#37. I grew up in a house with a mother who was a teacher and a Freedom Rider - very left-wing Democrats living in a heterogeneous working-class neighborhood. I picked up a lot of those values there, and I brought them with me when I showed up in Hollywood.
Ben Affleck
#38. 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.
Ben Affleck
#39. In our culture, we get very much into shorthanding people. And I got shorthanded as That Guy: Jennifer Lopez, movies bombed, therefore he must be a sort of thoughtless dilettante, solipsistic consumer blahblahblah. It's hard to shake those sort of narratives.
Ben Affleck
#40. You have to be kind to people. Treat them decently. There's no excuse for not.
Ben Affleck
#41. I went to the University of Vermont because I had a kind of unrequited love for this high school girlfriend. She wasn't even at the University but at another school nearby. But I thought if went to a school near her, just maybe ... I was really remedial about girls in so many ways.
Ben Affleck
#42. It's important for me to try my hand at philanthropy because I want to leave behind a record of someone who did more than just gobble up stuff for themselves. I realized that a life lived for yourself is not much of a life,
Ben Affleck
#43. 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.
Ben Affleck
#44. 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.
Ben Affleck
#45. Nobody goes to a movie and watches the script. There is a lot of other stuff going on.
Ben Affleck
#46. The best cure for a hangover is something one straight man can't do for another straight man.
Ben Affleck
#47. 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.
Ben Affleck
#48. A sale is made on every call you make. Either you sell the client some stock or he sells you a reason he can't. Either way a sale is made, the only question is: Who is gonna close?
Ben Affleck
#49. 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.
Ben Affleck
#50. When I watch a guy I know is a big Republican, part of me thinks I probably wouldn't like this person if I met him, or we would have different opinions.
Ben Affleck
#51. I'm a writer. An amateur photographer. An actor.
Ben Affleck
#52. 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.
Ben Affleck
#53. I don't want to jump off the roof or jump for joy depending on my movie reviews, or whether it makes money. I think the larger, more meaningful things are family and the people you love.
Ben Affleck
#54. You know George M. Steinbrenner III is the center of all evil in the universe.
Ben Affleck
#55. There's a lot of noise in the world, and the Internet magnifies that energy.
Ben Affleck
#56. I have a promptness problem. I am a promptness-free zone.
Ben Affleck
#57. People decided that I was the frat guy, even though I've never been inside a fraternity, or the guy who beat them up at school, even though that wasn't me at all.
Ben Affleck
#58. Making movies has become such a golden ring, and it's all such a big business, that the rewards system has gotten totally out of whack. Suddenly, you're treated in a manner befitting someone who is actually an important person.
Ben Affleck
#59. 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.
Ben Affleck
#60. I simply asked if I could have a go at adapting a screenplay. But I did not want any money, in case I failed because I did not want a script out there with my name on it that might be completely dysfunctional.
Ben Affleck
#61. 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.
Ben Affleck
#62. Sometimes I get insecure about being a real director because I look at the great directors, and they have such command. But maybe that keeps me critical of myself. Maybe it keeps me moving forward.
Ben Affleck
#63. On the day he had colonic irrigation: 'I feel I lost my virginity that day in so many ways.'
Ben Affleck
#64. 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.
Ben Affleck
#65. Not that it entirely matters: There is a perception that all actors make their movies. A lot of people assume you're responsible. George Clooney told me actors get all of the blame and all the credit.
Ben Affleck
#66. I'm very insecure. I'm human, just like anybody else.
Ben Affleck
#67. I lived with this tremendous fear of failure because my father was a playwright and a director, and I think he did a couple of things as a child as an actor as well, and he ... he failed, basically.
Ben Affleck
#68. I like roundtables because you can talk more directly to people. And you also can get kind of a vibe on what a journalist's take is on something, and have a conversation with them more.
Ben Affleck
#69. It's wrong and disgusting to follow children around and take their picture and sell it for money.
Ben Affleck
#70. I'm much more interested in what an actor has to say about something substantial and important than who they're dating or what clothes they're wearing or some other asinine, insignificant aspect of their life.
Ben Affleck
#71. Such a senseless and tragic day. My family and I send our love to our beloved and resilient Boston.
Ben Affleck
#72. 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.
Ben Affleck
#73. I have a good relationship with the world. But I don't know what the trick is to maintaining it.
Ben Affleck
#74. 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.
Ben Affleck
#75. The first 'Star Wars' movie had come out in 1977 and had become this huge phenomenon with all the toys and everything - it just kind of swept America. But internationally, it was also a big deal.
Ben Affleck
#76. If I ever woke up with a dead hooker in my hotel room, Matt would be the first person I'd call.
Ben Affleck
#77. I thought I could rely on the plot in the novel and fill in the colour between the lines, but I made a mistake with that assumption. It was really, really hard because you pull a few things apart and then you realise how everything relies on everything else and it can all fall apart.
Ben Affleck
#78. Directing is monumentally complicated and it's a function of all the time you pay to it. I think it would be great to do a movie I'm not in, I could just eat Fritos and just say, 'yeah, it's good!' Some day.
Ben Affleck
#79. My mother taught public school, went to Harvard and then got her master's there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school. My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn't go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard.
Ben Affleck
#80. They say money can't buy happiness? Look at the smile on my face. Ear to ear, baby!
Ben Affleck
#81. Well I've never used that phrase before, but yes she is bootylicious.
Ben Affleck
#82. There are two things for a marriage to be good. One is to work hard on it. The other one is to marry above you. And I succeeded at both of those.
Ben Affleck
#83. It doesn't matter how you get knocked down in life, because that's going to happen. All that matters is that you gotta get up.
Ben Affleck
#84. What happens is this sort of bleed-over from the tabloids across your movie work. You go to a movie, you only go once. But the tabloids and Internet are everywhere. You can really subsume the public image of somebody.
Ben Affleck
#85. 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.
Ben Affleck
#86. Rumors about me? Calista Flockhart, Pam Anderson, and Matt Damon. That's who I'm dating.
Ben Affleck
#87. On playing Batman and his daughter: If I was doing the sequel to Frozen I would be a hero. My two older daughters could give a sh-t about Batman and they've now passed that affection onto my son. He's always like, 'Papa, can I watch Frozen?' And I'm like, 'No, dude, it's not on again!'.
Ben Affleck
#88. I'm not the most loathsome man in the world. I've dropped to number nine.
Ben Affleck
#89. Studios are used to have an investment in you, an actual, literal investment in an actor. You paid them some money, you had a contract with them and you were almost like a commodity.
Ben Affleck
#90. The thing about online gambling is that it's never away, it's always accessible. And so, if you have an issue with gambling, it's designed to take advantage of that.
Ben Affleck
#91. There is currency to celebrity, or celebrity is a currency ... You can spend it in a lot of ways, or you can squander it. You can be taxed, as well. I really started thinking long and hard about how to use that currency as long as I had it.
Ben Affleck
#92. I like to think that if I were gay I would be out. Rupert Everett-style.
Ben Affleck
#93. Anxiety is a kind of fuel that activates the fight-or-flight part of the brain in me. It makes sure that a velociraptor isn't around the corner and that you do as much as you possibly can to survive. Because Hollywood has a lot in common with 'Jurassic Park' and its primeval-dinosaur universe.
Ben Affleck
#94. People of similar political persuasions tend to flock together.
Ben Affleck
#95. Yes, I'm going to be the President of the United States. You know why? You think you can get chicks by being in the movies? You can really get chicks by being the President.
Ben Affleck
#96. All I do, really, is go to work and try to be professional, be on time and be prepared.
Ben Affleck
#97. 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.
Ben Affleck
#98. I've learned to think, I may succeed or fail, but I'm going to do so on the merit of my own instincts.
Ben Affleck
#99. There's a lot of crazy, weird people out there. It's an ugly world.
Ben Affleck
#100. One guy told me I was a great actor, I just would never be on the cover of a magazine.
Ben Affleck
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