Top 100 Matt Damon Quotes
#1. You don't know about real loss, 'cause it only occurs when you've loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much.
Matt Damon
#2. If you're just an actor you're reactive. You're saying, "Well, I hope Hollywood gives me a role, or gives me a chance at a role," whereas if you can generate your own content, then you can go where you want to go.
Matt Damon
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Right before 'The Bourne Identity' came out, I hadn't been offered a movie in a year.
Matt Damon
#6. My wife is my soul mate. I can't imagine being without her.
Matt Damon
#7. If Brad Pitt walked down the street, cars would crash into each other. I'm really lucky not to have to deal with that.
Matt Damon
#8. All you have in the end is to look back and like the choices you've made.
Matt Damon
#9. I can't think of any more important value to instill in our children than the desire to help others. I feel strongly about setting an example for them. Real problems can be solved by the next generation if we instill in them the right values.
Matt Damon
#10. It's better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.
Matt Damon
#11. If I had a bucket list, I'd say raising my four girls to be strong, good women would be No. 1,
Matt Damon
#12. 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
#13. I need to know if she [Sarah Palin] thinks dinosaurs were here four thousand years ago ... because she's going to have the nuclear code.
Matt Damon
#14. 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
#15. 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.
Matt Damon
#16. 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.
Matt Damon
#17. It's just better to be yourself than to try to be some version of what you think the other person wants.
Matt Damon
#18. 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
#19. You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.
Matt Damon
#20. Any moron with a pack of matches can start a fire. Raining down sulfur takes a huge level of endurance. Mass genocide is the most exhausting activity one can engage in, next to soccer.
Matt Damon
#21. Please find out what you can do to make a difference. Take five minutes to educate yourself on an issue you didn't know about before. Then tell somebody else.
Matt Damon
#22. I believe a solid, really strong middle-class is the key to making the country in the best way.
Matt Damon
#23. It's pretty easy to kind of lose your way. Having kids is really helpful. They kind of disabuse you of the notion of your greatness pretty quickly.
Matt Damon
#24. For Ripley I learned to play some songs on the piano, and I never really played them again.
Matt Damon
#25. Some people just see the glory and they don't want to know about the story.
Matt Damon
#26. When you have a child, your relationship with every child in the world changes. It's like you're in a club you didn't know existed before a child came into your life. I believe you should make the world more beautiful for all children in any way that you can.
Matt Damon
#27. You will never solve poverty without solving water and sanitation.
Matt Damon
#28. Life is on the wire. The rest is just waiting.
Matt Damon
#29. For a lot of actors, our biggest fear is that we're going to start talking about things we don't fully understand and sound like idiots.
Matt Damon
#30. 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
#31. [Americans] can't understand that the water in our toilet is cleaner than 880 million have access to.
Matt Damon
#32. 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.
Matt Damon
#33. And you know, we were talking about American identity, and where we've come from and where we are and where we're headed. We knew that we wanted to have a hopeful ending and we wanted it to be pro-community, and a pro-democracy type of movie.
Matt Damon
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. I usually play characters that are a lot different than me. I mean, I'm never in a fight in a movie and if I'm in them, I'm usually losing.
Matt Damon
#37. It's intuitive in terms of when I read a piece of material or I hear about a project. I'm a writer, so I've written movies. I've read at this point thousands and thousands and thousands of screenplays. So if something gets me, then I don't ignore that.
Matt Damon
#38. 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
#39. Sometimes all you need is 20 seconds of insane courage
Matt Damon
#40. It was shameful and embarrassing that there were two years in a row without a single actor of color nominated. That's insane.
Matt Damon
#41. 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.
Matt Damon
#42. If you can't help people, then what is the point of being successful?
Matt Damon
#43. 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.
Matt Damon
#44. 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.
Matt Damon
#45. Clean water is only as far away as the nearest tap, and there are taps everywhere. There's a faucet everywhere. But the reality is, the water in our toilets is cleaner than the water that most people are drinking.
Matt Damon
#46. Paranoid is what people who are trying to take advantage call you in an effort to get you to drop your guard.
Matt Damon
#47. You know, a one-term president with some balls who actually got stuff done would have been, in the long run of the country, much better.
Matt Damon
#48. I'll play Pretty Pretty Princess with you if you just let me watch a little bit of March Madness.
Matt Damon
#49. 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
#50. The whole thrust of theatre is different, just because the writing is so much more respected in a play. Whereas in movies - and having been the writer, I can say from experience - the writer is lower down on the food chain.
Matt Damon
#51. 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.
Matt Damon
#52. Generally, the bigger the budget, the less interesting the characters become.
Matt Damon
#53. 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
#54. The ideal life is you don't sell a single magazine, nobody's interested, but they want to come see your movie. Because that gives you true freedom.
Matt Damon
#55. It's an objective fact, that if you want to solve some of these huge, kind of bigger problems of extreme poverty, you have to include the women. They're the ones who will get it done.
Matt Damon
#56. Before the days of video village a director should stand right next to the camera, look with his naked eye and if he sees something that is real to him, he'd look up at the [camera] operator and if he gives the look to indicate he'd seen it to, then you print and you'd move on.
Matt Damon
#57. What is your greatest regret?
Not staying in better touch with people who truly mattered to me before they died unexpectedly.
Matt Damon
#58. 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
#59. 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.
Matt Damon
#60. I should have done it years ago. It's amazing I didn't even want cigarettes anymore.
Matt Damon
#61. I've been really lucky. I'll completely forget that I'm a celebrity. And then something will happen, and I'll go, 'Oh, right.'
Matt Damon
#62. 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.
Matt Damon
#63. There are people who just collect a bunch of footage and then edit it later. You definitely feel more protected when a director is moving on when you've actually felt something happen and you know they're watching intently.
Matt Damon
#64. I think marrying somebody who's not a celebrity, it just takes a lot of the pressure off.
Matt Damon
#65. People do things in the names of good, and in the name of ideals, but the world isn't that simple. So they end up doing things that aren't necessarily good. Even if they think they're doing the right thing, but when viewed from a different perspective they can look barbaric and crazy.
Matt Damon
#66. 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.
Matt Damon
#67. 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
#68. If you work at something, you get better at it.
Matt Damon
#69. We're here for such a short time. When your great-great-grandkids study history, don't you want them to be proud that you were part of the solution?
Matt Damon
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. If anybody wanted to photograph my life, they'd get bored in a day.
Matt Damon
#74. My heart goes out to the people of the city of Boston. My thoughts and prayers are with the families who lost loved ones in such a senseless and heartless way.
Matt Damon
#75. 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.
Matt Damon
#76. 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
#77. 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
#79. If there's an idea I think is really good and I feel like I can write it, then I'll do it.
Matt Damon
#80. He's famous for being obsessive about details.
Matt Damon
#81. Our kids are growing up with more privilege than we had; that's true for most of my friends in L.A. I don't know any actor who grew up with any particular privilege, so everyone wrestles with this. And I think, a lot of times, it's about being patient with your kids.
Matt Damon
#82. The better the actor, the less you know about his life. I mean, nobody's better than De Niro and you don't know anything about him, right?
Matt Damon
#83. As actors, we react to the material that's out there, and I probably just react more strongly to things that I feel will have some social value.
Matt Damon
#84. If your movies don't perform, they just stop calling you.
Matt Damon
#85. As a struggling actor, you're not looking for parts that define you; you're just looking for work.
Matt Damon
#86. All parents are trying to balance. Look, I'm lucky in the sense that I can control my hours. I can choose my jobs, and not everybody has that choice. But I definitely, it's a family decision every time I take a job.
Matt Damon
#87. History is change happening one person at a time.
Matt Damon
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. If we listen to the better angels of our nature, there are creative and good solutions to serious problems.
Matt Damon
#92. Liberty is a soul's right to breathe.
Matt Damon
#93. I've gotten much better at multi-tasking. It's hard, though. But, writing a script is not totally focused. You're taking little breaks, all the time. If a kid runs in, you give 'em a horsey ride. It's a pretty fluid process.
Matt Damon
#94. I grew up in and the teachers. I think I was very lucky. I think I had a lot of social capital, and so when I found myself in this position of influence, I just - then I started to engage a bit with some of the problems in the world and realize that I could actually have an impact.
Matt Damon
#95. 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.
Matt Damon
#96. All you need is twenty seconds of insane courage and I promise you something great will come of it.
Matt Damon
#97. 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.
Matt Damon
#98. The director's in charge of every single decision [in film]. It's a dictatorship.It's a benevolent dictatorship, but it's true. It's every single shot. There's nothing arbitrary.
Matt Damon
#99. 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.
Matt Damon
#100. The first time I smoked was at home with my mother and stepfather; they were like, If you are going to do this, we'd rather you did this with us.
Matt Damon
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