Someday, the phone will stop ringing–I’ve always known it– and the band will stop playing. Hollywood is a tough, hard-nosed business. But I don’t need it anymore. I think I’m a better man.

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. I know that’s the way Heath Ledger feels and Ben Affleck feels the same way, too. We want to take the big swings.

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

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’m not being a monk. I live my life in New York. I have a girlfriend [Luciana Barroso]. But it’s not cost-effective for paparazzi to follow us. They can get one picture of us walking down the street.

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.”

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.

[on The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)] We’re all signed on in principle, in the sense that we’ve all agreed that we want to do it, but we’re not going to do it unless we have a great script. It’s ours to lose at the minute and, if we do make a third one, we want to make it as good as the first two. And if we can’t do that, then we’re going to have to let it drop.

[on The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)] If you have any ideas for a script, please, call Universal! We’ve gone so far from the book. [Robert Ludlum] wrote it as a trilogy and we’ve really kind of ignored that plot because it’s very Cold War. And so, in the updating process, we kind of threw out most of what he had so we’re kind of on our own to find a third one. “Bourne Ultimatum” is the third one and I feel like I’ve given ultimatums in both the first two!

If anybody wanted to photograph my life, they’d get bored in a day. “Here’s 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.

What I want to do is a character-driven porn movie. It’s all going to be about characters, and the porn’s gonna grow all out of the character’s and it’s going to serve as character development.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Bond character will always be anchored in the 1960s and in the values of the 1960s. It’s so anachronistic when you put it in the world we live in today that Mike Myers made a fortune with his own spy franchise [Austin Powers] – it makes for great comedy. Bond is an imperialist and a misogynist who kills people and laughs about it, and drinks martinis and cracks jokes. Bourne is a serial monogamist whose girlfriend is dead and he does nothing but think about her. He doesn’t have the support of gadgets, and he feels guilty for what he’s done.

(On being seen as a ‘nice’ celebrity) I don’t hold myself to some higher standard of behavior. You don’t have to do a lot to be seen as nice. I guess some of these people must be such rampant pricks that people are amazed when you say hello. I don’t know why people like me, and I don’t know if I want to know. That might be the kiss of death. I’d rather people not know a lot about me and go see the movies.

You’ve given an aging suburban dad the ego-boost of a lifetime. (On being named People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive 2007)

(On celebrity campaigns against such things as childhood poverty and disease) Look, I would much rather people were listening to politicians about this than actors. But the politicians aren’t talking about this, you know.

(Talking about working with Robert De Niro in The Good Shepherd (2006)): I think I can say I’m a better actor after having worked with Robert De Niro.

(On his favorite roles) Good Will Hunting (1997) is so close to my heart because my best friend [Ben Affleck] and I invented him, he’s from Boston, and it was what we knew. The stakes were pretty high with “Good Will Hunting” and it worked out as best as it can in this business – people saw the movie, it got good reviews, I was happy with the finished product, and they gave us an Oscar. I am also pretty fond of “Tom Ripley” – playing smart and sinister is just so much fun. I wasn’t that fond of his choice of swim trunks, though, so a few points away for that. And “John Grady Cole” in All the Pretty Horses (2000) was good, too. The integrity of that character is admirable. Unfortunately, I am the only one who saw that movie, so no one will get that reference.

You do the actuary tables, there’s a one out of three chance, if not more, that McCain doesn’t survive his first term, and it’ll be President Palin. It’s like a really bad Disney movie, ‘The Hockey Mom.’ Oh, I’m just a hockey mom from Alaska, and she’s president. She’s facing down Vladimir Putin and using the folksy stuff she learned at the hockey rink. It’s absurd.

(On James Bond) He’s repulsive. Bond is an imperialist, misogynist, sociopath who goes around bedding women and swilling martinis and killing people. The movies have a formula, they stick to it, and it makes them a lot of money. They know what they are doing and they’re going to keep doing it.

[on the difference between Jason Bourne and James Bond] He’s not like Bond, who goes on individual missions. I mean, you could make Bond movies forever, because you’d start each film at the beginning of a new mission. But Bourne isn’t built that way, unfortunately.

[on 9/11] That day is seared into who I am more than I’d even like. It was weird because I stepped outside my apartment, looked up and saw it happening and then went back in and just watched CNN because I just wanted information. I remember everything about that day.

Ask anybody on the street which actors starred in the “Ocean’s” movies, and they’ll tell you it was George [Clooney] and Brad [Pitt]. I’m ‘support’ in “Ocean’s”. As I was in Saving Private Ryan (1998) – Tom [Hanks] carried that movie. You could accuse me of piggybacking on other people’s brilliance more than anything.

[on the Oscars] They should give them out 10 years later, like the way they do the Hall of Fame in baseball. They do it in five years, but if you did 10 years later, if this year (2010), we were voting on what was the best picture of 2000, I think it would be much more honest. It’s like, when you pick up great old movies and you go, why the hell didn’t Brando win the Oscar for this one? Who won that year? Whatever the sizzle was about that year. 50 years later you’re looking at a movie and going, this is a historic cinematic performance.

[on the possibility of a fourth Jason Bourne movie] I don’t know, you know. I think it will be a prequel of some kind with another actor and another director before we (himself and director Paul Greengrass) do another one. I think we are probably five years away from another one. We gotta get a script.

I want to direct someday and I can’t really pass up the chance to work with the people I’m getting to work with. I’ve worked with Paul Greengrass three times now, and Clint Eastwood twice, and Steven Soderbergh five or six times, and the Cohen Brothers this month. As long as that keeps happening, I can’t see myself taking time off, unless the work dried up.

Usually the scripts I get have got Brad Pitt’s fingerprints on them, or Leonardo DiCaprio’s.