Matthew Perry

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Like, my house has a nice view, because, you know, I was on 'Friends.'

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.

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 used to spend a lot of time just thinking about myself, thinking that the party started when I showed up.

I think we need to educate our doctors about addiction.

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!

I don't need to be reminded that I was on 'Friends.' I remember - some of it, anyway.

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'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.

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 have a huge interest in hockey because I grew up in Canada, where it's kind of the law that you love hockey.

I gravitate towards sort of broken characters who try to be better people.

I learned to fall down early in life - I was, like, six - because I realized it was a way to make girls laugh.

I've been accused of not really paying attention to a sentence unless my name comes up in it twice.

When I die, I'd like' Friends' to be listed behind 'helping people.'

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 don't have a very 'masculine' taste in music. I get a lot of heat from my friends about that.

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.

In high school, my prom date fooled around with another guy - on prom night!

If I could walk into the 'Friends' audition again and go or not go, I have to say it's 50-50.

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.

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 know Chandler is similar to me. But if you watched my life for a week, there would be many more boring parts.

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.

To be a comedian, you have to have some darkness behind it. I certainly draw on my past, and it helps.

'Friends' was a magical thing, and no one's going to ever have anything like that again.

It's tough to have a movie-star persona when you're on a show as successful as '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.

It's not foreign for me to be talking about my problems in circles.

I've just found out there are pages on the internet dedicated to whether I'm gay or not.

I've certainly had a lot of experiences in my life where I was much too self-centered.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

'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.