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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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