Matthew Perry
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.Collection: Dating
My favorite six words in recovery are: trust God, clean house, and help others.Collection: God
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.Collection: Experience
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.Collection: Parenting
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.Collection: Famous
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.Collection: Great
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.Collection: Humor
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.Collection: Experience
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.Collection: Great
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'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.
I've certainly had a lot of experiences in my life where I was much too self-centered.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
It's tough to have a movie-star persona when you're on a show as successful as 'Friends.'
'Friends' was a magical thing, and no one's going to ever have anything like that again.
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'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.
If I could walk into the 'Friends' audition again and go or not go, I have to say it's 50-50.
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.
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.
I don't have a very 'masculine' taste in music. I get a lot of heat from my friends about that.
I've been accused of not really paying attention to a sentence unless my name comes up in it twice.
I would always be the kid that got in trouble in school, that's for sure, for joking around.
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.'
When I die, I'd like' Friends' to be listed behind 'helping people.'
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.
If there's a silence in a room I'll try to fill it as soon as humanly possible.
I've just found out there are pages on the internet dedicated to whether I'm gay or not.
To be a comedian, you have to have some darkness behind it. I certainly draw on my past, and it helps.
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.
The thing is, if I don't have sobriety, I don't have anything.
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.
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 think we need to educate our doctors about addiction.
To me, writing is remembering something funny that happened, or maybe something I said seven years ago.
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.'
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.
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.
Ninety percent of video game AI really is pretty damn bad. I think that's actually why it's so much fun to shoot things. Because the AI is so bad and the characters are so annoying.
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.
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.
In high school, my prom date fooled around with another guy - on prom night!
I loved playing Chandler. I grew up playing that part.
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.
Nine times out of 10, women don't want to fix a problem, they just want to be understood. I'll never get that.