Matthew Perry Quotes
Actor
I grew up babysitting and always enjoyed it. I love family. A couple of my closest friends have kids, and I'm their godfather, and that's one of my greatest pleasures in life, just picking them up from school and hanging out with them.
I got sober because I was worried I was going to die next year.
My sense of style is an old Polo shirt, jeans and, unfortunately for the longest time, white running shoes, which was not attractive. The one thing I've learned about clothes is to ask a girl.
When I was younger, I used humour as a tool to avoid getting too serious with people - if there was deep emotional stuff going on, then I would crack a joke to defuse the situation.
'The Whole Nine Yards' I liked right away. It was kind of a dark comedy at first. And just the idea of being in a movie with Bruce Willis was pretty exciting.
There are two ways to go when you hit that crossroads in your life: There is the bad way, when you sort of give up, and then there is the really hard way, when you fight back. I went the hard way and came out of it okay. Now, I'm sitting here and doing great.
My favorite six words in recovery are: trust God, clean house, and help others.
I need a woman to have a quirky sense of humor. There's a bunch of jokes I use, and if she doesn't get them, she's probably not for me.
In a perfect world, my tennis game gets better. I have kids and a beautiful wife and live on some hill somewhere that's not in Los Angeles. And the script that Tom Hanks just barely turned down gets in my hands.
I have what I like to call a 'chinneck.' My chin just flows rather easily into my neck.
I don't need to be reminded that I was on 'Friends.' I remember - some of it, anyway.
My favorite actor was, is, Michael Keaton. Certainly growing up, in the movie 'Night Shift' he did something brand new that I hadn't seen before that we all steal from now. And then it was in 1987 he did the movie 'Clean and Sober' and 'Beetlejuice' in the same year, and that was when I said, 'Wow, that's what I want to do.'
The thing is, if I don't have sobriety, I don't have anything.
I'm very similar to Chandler in many ways, although Chandler is funnier than me, and Chandler absolutely hates his job whereas I absolutely love my job.
I'm a sensitive guy. If you are a woman and you're in any kind of emotional duress and you write a song about it, I'll buy you album.
If I could walk into the 'Friends' audition again and go or not go, I have to say it's 50-50.
I gravitate towards sort of broken characters who try to be better people.
When I was, like, 15, I realized there could be a career in making people laugh - like, you could get paid to do it. That was insane to me.
Nine times out of 10, women don't want to fix a problem, they just want to be understood. I'll never get that.
Chandler's the guy everybody thinks will do well with women, but he thinks too much and says the wrong thing.
'Friends' was a magical thing, and no one's going to ever have anything like that again.
I used to be a real prince charming if I went on a date with a girl. But then I'd get to where I was likely to have a stroke from the stress of keeping up my act. I've since learned the key to a good date is to pay attention on her.
I've certainly had a lot of experiences in my life where I was much too self-centered.
I always have the same thing - which is the fear of not getting a laugh - that I've had from the time I was a kid; obsessing over, 'This joke doesn't quite work, we've got to get this right.' I was always like that, whether I was a member of a six-person ensemble or whether I'm the center of a show.
I became a big Kings fan, and then later on my hometown of Ottawa got a team, so then I was very, very torn. I just love both of those teams very much.
I've been accused of not really paying attention to a sentence unless my name comes up in it twice.
If I hadn't had the experience of being famous, I would have searched for it my whole life. I would have just gone on and on trying to find it.
I learned to fall down early in life - I was, like, six - because I realized it was a way to make girls laugh.
I have a huge interest in hockey because I grew up in Canada, where it's kind of the law that you love hockey.
As for my personal life, I'd love to start a family of my own. I think I'd make a great dad, and I think shortly I would make a great husband.
Trying to overcome addiction is one of the hardest things for a person to do. And the fact that I had to do it under the scrutiny of tabloid press at first made it seem even more difficult. But in fact, it oddly ended up being a plus. Because of the tabloid stuff, it wasn't like I could walk into a bar and order a drink.
My feeling on therapy is it's a luxury, and if you're fortunate enough to get some smart people to talk to about life, then that's fortunate and you should go for it.
I went to a high school that didn't have many people in it. There were, like, 60 people in my senior class. There was a group of cool kids and a group of really dorky kids, and I was probably the coolest of the really dorky kids.
I think if you look back at all those great comedies on television in the past, it's all lovable losers that gathered together - 'Taxi' and 'Cheers,' 'Seinfeld' and 'Friends.'
I've been on a show before where I was on a billboard and then, after like three or four weeks, they took the billboard down and replaced it with nothing. Took my face down and put a white board up.
I certainly like the rumour that I was the father of Elizabeth Hurley's baby. It made me think I could impregnate women in a different way to everyone else. Elizabeth and I were never alone in a room together, so I must be a very powerful man indeed. Actually, I'm thinking of suing the baby!
The key to sitcom success is miserable people. If you see a happy couple, it's just gone, like when Sam and Diane got together on Cheers.
I think we need to educate our doctors about addiction.
I'm just glad that the whole John Wayne persona of a man is sort of old school now, because I'd never be able to do that. If that was the going rate today, I wouldn't be working.
Like, my house has a nice view, because, you know, I was on 'Friends.'
It's not foreign for me to be talking about my problems in circles.
I certainly wear my heart on my sleeve, and I think that comes out in the characters that I play. There's a yearning, or something, that comes out of me that people relate to.
I have a well-documented history of trouble with intimacy.
I don't have a very 'masculine' taste in music. I get a lot of heat from my friends about that.
There are two sides to being pigeonholed. There's, 'Oh, no, I'm going to be Chandler for the rest of my life,' but there's also the fact that getting to play Chandler opened up doors to me. It's now my job to find things that shake it up a little bit.
To me, writing is remembering something funny that happened, or maybe something I said seven years ago.
I would always be the kid that got in trouble in school, that's for sure, for joking around.
I know Chandler is similar to me. But if you watched my life for a week, there would be many more boring parts.
When I die, I'd like' Friends' to be listed behind 'helping people.'
That's like the greatest experiences of my life still, 'Friends,' so it's not something I want to get away from, but I do want to try and show something new.
The thing that I'm most proud of in my life is that if a stranger came up to me and said, 'I can't stop drinking. I can't stop drinking. Can you help me?' I can say, 'Yes, I can help you.'
I loved playing Chandler. I grew up playing that part.
I was a guy who wanted to become famous. There was steam coming out of my ears, I wanted to be famous so badly. You want the attention, you want the bucks, and you want the best seat in the restaurant. I didn't think what the repercussions would be.
Women always think that I'm Chandler, so if I don't joke around for half an hour, they think that something's wrong. Then I explain that I don't have comedy writers scripting everything I'm saying at this particular dinner.
I've just found out there are pages on the internet dedicated to whether I'm gay or not.
In high school, my prom date fooled around with another guy - on prom night!
The goal is to have to do the shot again because the camera guy shook a little bit as he was laughing. Without that happening, I'm not happy because there's nothing better for me than a world that everybody's just trying to make each other laugh.
I used to spend a lot of time just thinking about myself, thinking that the party started when I showed up.
I would like you all to give me a round of applause as I have not crashed my car in over 15 months.
I'd say that on 'Friends' my character was the guy bouncing around the room. I'm no longer that guy, necessarily, in my life. I used to be. But I'm not now.
To be a comedian, you have to have some darkness behind it. I certainly draw on my past, and it helps.
I never really thought of myself as a physical comedian. But when I was a kid, I used to, you know, pretend to trip over things to make girls laugh in school and stuff like that. So I kind of learned how to fall without hurting yourself.
A lot of people think that addiction is a choice. A lot of people think it's a matter of will. That has not been my experience. I don't find it to have anything to do with strength.
They say that women like a man who can make them laugh, and I find that if you can make a woman laugh on the first and second dates, then you're doing well.
Vicodin, I got addicted to that little pill. The reason I don't talk about it too much in the press is because it isn't funny, and I love to be funny in interviews. If you joke about that period in your life, it doesn't seem right.
There was a time when I wasn't working a lot. It ebbs and flows. Mostly I was just living my life and playing 'Fallout 3,' a very fun game.
I would love to have kids one day. In fact, I'm pretty good with them. I grew up with five half-siblings, the youngest of whom is 11 years younger than me, so I think I learned some pretty cool parenting skills quite early on in life.
I was a very good tennis player in Ottawa, Canada - nationally ranked when I was, like, 13. Then I moved to Los Angeles when I was 15, and everyone in L.A. just killed me. I was pretty great in Canada. Not so much in Los Angeles.
I learned a valuable lesson doing 'Mr. Sunshine,' which is that I didn't want to be in charge because it's too much. Being in charge and acting in every scene was just too difficult. It's like eating dinner in a moving golf cart every night.
I am fine with the fact that some of my hair is gray. If it was all gray overnight, that would be a scary thing.
I can tell if someone is talking to me because I'm on 'Friends' or cause they just think I'm neat. You know I don't think I've ever spent more than five or ten minutes with somebody who was ogling me because they recognized me from the show.
Well, I was lucky enough to be involved in about 19 failures at an early age, so I'm realistic about the success I'm having and how quickly it can go away. What's important is to be smart about it.
I love the idea of 'the one' but I actually believe that there isn't a Miss Right. There are 12,000 Miss Rights out there and it's all timing.
If there's a silence in a room I'll try to fill it as soon as humanly possible.
After I got my first laugh on stage, I was hooked.
As an actor, being on autopilot is the worst thing possible.
It's tough to have a movie-star persona when you're on a show as successful as 'Friends.'