Ben affleck quotes

I do the same thing for myself (as an actor) that I do for others.

The value of work, and of always learning something new, and what it takes to achieve excellence. I really believe in those things that you have to dedicate yourself and spend time, that excellence is elusive. It's a little maddening, to try to have that level of discipline in your life, and I don't succeed all the time. But I do try.

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.

I'm a writer. An amateur photographer. An actor.

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.

You have to pay people real money.

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.

Memories, all those little experiences make up the fabric of our lives and on balance, I wouldn't want to erase any of them, tempting though it may be.

Such a senseless and tragic day. My family and I send our love to our beloved and resilient Boston.

One guy told me I was a great actor, I just would never be on the cover of a magazine.

I grew up in a home environment where I wasn't getting esteem for anything I did.

I want to thank my wife who I don't normally usually associate with Iran. I want to thank you for working on our marriage for 10 Christmases. It's good. It is work, but it's the best kind of work, and there's no one I'd rather work with!

I think we all like to see ourselves as good dads, but there's also that fear, 'Oh, I don't want to be like my father,' or, 'I hope my kid doesn't turn out like me.' You know, I have those feelings too. So the key is optimism.

Anybody tells you that money is the root of all evil doesn't have any.

No matter what you're doing, if you're trying to make a movie, you need to be working with people that are really good and who make you better.

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.

Marriage hasn't been my thing. But gay people, knock yourselves out!

I find forgiveness to be really healthy.

You wasted $150,000 on an education you could have got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library.

Everyone has a different approach, but I like to shoot a lot of film anyway.

I have a good instinct for what's real and what's not. I don't have to second-guess myself.

A lot of my shows in the past have been more theatrical than others, but you really get the bug for it when you direct on stage.

I never know what my next move will be in Hollywood. It's such an unpredictable town. People get jaded and lost and I've been able to stay a float. I think the next logical step in my career would be to start my own filmmaking empire like (Harvey Weinstein) and (Bob Weinstein) did so many years ago. I think if only the unions weren't so strict in Boston, I'd set up shop there and make films of a certain quality you don't see represented these days. I'm full of ideas and dreams.

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.

My professional success is really important to me, and my career is really important to me. It's the most important thing to me outside of my family. I take it very seriously and work really, really hard at it. Family comes first, but this is something that's really important to me too.

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.

I feel like casting is the most important aspect of making movies.

If you think Hollywood is depressing and corrupt, politics is really depressing and corrupt -- and fueled even more than Hollywood by money -- if that's possible.

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.

I remember back when I was a kid there was a comic strip called Plastic Man. His body was elastic and he could make his extremities as long as he wanted. As a youngster I didn't fully appreciate. But I'm now thinking Plastic Man was probably pretty popular with the ladies.

You have to be kind to people. Treat them decently. There's no excuse for not.

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.

[Directing first film:] I was terrified, it was really very scary because there is a lot of responsibility. I think I was terrified because I wanted it to work so much. A lot of actors direct movies but I thought the stakes were kind of higher for me because I really, really cared. [...] I just worked as hard as I possibly could on every single thing, every single day. I said that if this failed it would not be because I didn't work as hard as I possibly could...every day.

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.

I'm human, just like anybody else.

There's something really great and romantic about being poor and sleeping on couches.

I try to cast really good actors and give them a chance to do their very best work, give them as much time and space as they need.

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.

Online gambling is very seductive and very illusory. It can seem like a really good idea. It can seem like what people told you to work hard and get ahead, but when someone shows you something and it's too good to be true, it probably is.

Family is a wonderful thing, but it doesn't mean you can't do other stuff in your life. In fact, having a family makes whatever other thing you have that much richer. If it was just me, I'd be home alone and think, 'Well, something good happened at work,' but it's much nicer to share it with people you love.

You don't know what the pattern of flour and chicken is going to be, but you know you're going to get some good fried chicken.

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.

You get old, you slow down.

We wanted to show people what it was like in one of those neighbourhoods that they would never have access to, in bars that they would be too scared to go into, and a world that they would never get to see. All of that is something really unusual and rare and kind of fascinating. And the only way to do that and to make it really worthwhile was that it had to be authentic. We dedicated a lot of time and energy to making that right and real. So we found basically the worst locations that we could.

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.

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?

The best cure for a hangover is something one straight man can't do for another straight man.

My mother gets all mad at me if I stay in a hotel. I'm 31-years-old, and I don't want to sleep on a sleeping bag down in the basement. It's humiliating.

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.

There's a lot of romance to sort of living by your own rules and sort of not subscribing to what society tells you to do, but society pushes back pretty strongly, so there's a lot of compromise that goes with that.

Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms.

Nobody goes to a movie and watches the script. There is a lot of other stuff going on.

I don't go back and look at the monitor between every take; I wait until I feel like we finally got it right: "Let me stop and look at that last one on the monitor."

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.

I think I'd rather tell the truth and say what I believe in and make people unhappy than sort of pretend to think something else to accommodate them and try to be liked. That's just the way it goes and I don't think I'm any great champion of anything, but if they're going to put me on a show, I'm going to say what I think.

Persia is very different from the Arab Middle East in terms of architecture and language. Even though we think of them as one big Middle Eastern area, in truth, Persia's quite distinct.

I get to the point where I feel relaxed, and then I just shoot a ton of material and make a lot of different choices.

I have three women in the house. I get to be wrong three times a day.

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.

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.

If I ever woke up with a dead hooker in my hotel room, Matt would be the first person I'd call.

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.

Its not who you love. Its how.

I just feel like sometimes I'm a force to be dealt with. My talents are sometimes overused and also sometimes underused. It's not easy being me.

All I do, really, is go to work and try to be professional, be on time and be prepared.

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.

I dyed my hair for photo tests... I kept it because when am I ever going to be blond again?

Rumors about me? Calista Flockhart, Pam Anderson, and Matt Damon. That's who I'm dating.

Every single director-actor I talked to, from Warren Beatty to Clint Eastwood to George Clooney, said the biggest mistake they made is not shooting enough footage of themselves.

There's a lot of noise in the world, and the internet magnifies that energy.

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.

People ascribe a certain kind of silliness to the movie business. Everybody feels like, "In the movies, they do crazy stuff."

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.

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.

I'm trying to make people feel welcome and feel valued.

If we try to define our own moral universe, there's a price for that.

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.

School plays are fine. Theater in school is fine.

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.

Sometimes the people we meet change us forever.

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.

The first thing that I really understood politically and was old enough to get was the failed assassination attempt on Reagan.

I've consciously taken on material that's a bit too much for me but not an overreach. The first movie, just about performances. 'The Town,' I learned how to work broader material, develop tension, direct bigger scenes, action sequences. 'Argo,' I experimented with film stock, widened the scope of my geography.

I'm not the most loathsome man in the world. I've dropped to number nine.

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.

You're basically the sum of all the experiences you've ever had, and they're sort of shaken up in you and reproduced in the things you create, and that includes seeing movies.

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.

My mother went to Radcliffe, and rather than just trying to get rich, she wanted to be a teacher and taught for over 30 years in the public schools. She's definitely got some war stories.

It's been reinforced to me, and it's a little cliche, but I've learned that you can't make a movie that even works, much less that's good, without really good writing and really good acting. That lesson has led me to not be distracted, so much, by the other stuff going on in filmmaking and to focus on the essence of a story, and the words and the events and the way that those are interpreted by the actors. That philosophy has taken me to a place that I really like.

(I) try new things and give myself permission to fail and experiment because only that way can you get really successful.

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.

Also, getting the chance to play a supporting part meant that I didn't have to do as much as the protagonist, such as running around telling the story. [As the protagonist] you push the story whereas, paradoxically, as a character part, you have a chance to explore some of the nuance and some of the more complicated aspects of a character.

(As) a director who is a writer, I have respect for writers, so I'm less likely to step on an idea or a line.

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.

No matter how much you change, you still got to pay the price for the things you’ve done.

I feel like fame is wasted on me.

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

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.

I like to shoot until we have a relaxed environment on the set, and I try to schedule that.

When I look up at the screen and see myself I always have to laugh. Not because I think I'm doing a horrible job, quite the contrary, I just feel it's so surreal to feel like one person can entertain so many at one time.

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.

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.

It takes time to develop a sense of humor, shared world views.

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.

One of the differences between now and then is that the idea of body image is a much bigger issue now. Back then, just being kind of heavy and barrel-chested passed for heroic. Now, you wouldn't dare to play a hero without a lot of dieting and various specialised abdomen machines. But that was one of the things which was interesting about it and I did want to portray because there's good and bad.

I think when you have children, it just changes your worldview.

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.

I feel better about my life every day. My kids get older. My life is very rich and full of wonderful things. I've been very lucky, careerwise.

My mother always accused me of being in love with the sound of my own voice. When we went on road trips, she'd be like, 'Stop singing. Be quiet, you're talking just to hear yourself speak.' It was probably true. I like to ramble on, which is probably why I'm well suited to interviews. You know, there's no other forum where you're literally supposed to sit down and just talk for hours about yourself. I love it.

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.

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.

How about the more than 1 billion Muslim people in the U.S, who aren't fanatical, who don't punch women, who just want to go to school, have some sandwiches, and pray five times a day?

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.

I like to think that if I were gay I would be out. Rupert Everett-style.

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!'.

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.

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.

They say money can't buy happiness? Look at the smile on my face. Ear to ear, baby!

People think you have this exciting and romantic life, because you project this exciting, romantic life on screen. But in reality you're just doing the same thing as everyone else - you know, sitting around watching TV with your gut hanging out, playing with your kid, or even sitting on the toilet. You know what's weird? Even I'm not that interested in my personal life any more.

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.

Well I've never used that phrase before, but yes she is bootylicious.

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.

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.

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.

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.