Top 100 Matthew Perry Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There’s nothing better than a world where everybody’s just trying to make each other laugh.”

— Matthew Perry

2. “My favorite six words in recovery are: trust God, clean house, and help others.”

— Matthew Perry

3. “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.”

— Matthew Perry

4. “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.”

— Matthew Perry

5. “I really lived life to its fullest and that got me in trouble from time to time.”

— Matthew Perry

6. “God is everywhere – you just have to clear your channel, or you’ll miss it.”

— Matthew Perry

7. “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.”

— Matthew Perry

8. “I think you actually have to have all of your dreams come true to realize they are the wrong dreams.”

— Matthew Perry

9. “Now, all these years later, I’m certain that I got famous so I would not waste my entire life trying to get famous. You have to get famous to know that it’s not the answer. And nobody who is not famous will ever truly believe that.”

— Matthew Perry

10. “Like, my house has a nice view, because, you know, I was on ‘Friends.’”

— Matthew Perry

11. “You are everything I never knew that I always wanted.”

— Matthew Perry

12. “And if you’re going to blame your parents for the bad stuff, you also have to give them credit for the good stuff.”

— Matthew Perry

13. “I’m making plans to go away for a month to focus on my sobriety and to continue my life in recovery. Please enjoy making fun of me on the world wide web.”

— Matthew Perry

14. “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.”

— Matthew Perry

15. “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.”

— Matthew Perry

16. “Being in a kitchen always brings to mind God. He showed up to me in a kitchen, of course, and in doing so, saved my life. God is always there for me now, whenever I clear my channel to feel his awesomeness. It’s hard to believe, given everything, that he still shows up for us mortals, but he does, and that’s the point: love always wins.”

— Matthew Perry

17. “I’ve been able to get most people I’ve wanted, but this one still hurts. Which just shows that the exception proves the rule: when I can get someone, I have to leave them before they leave me, because I’m not enough and I’m about to be found out, but when someone I want doesn’t choose me, that just proves I’m not enough and I’ve been found out. Heads they win, tails I lose. Either way, to this day if someone mentions her name, my stomach clenches.”

— Matthew Perry

18. “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.’”

— Matthew Perry

19. “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.”

— Matthew Perry

20. “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.’”

— Matthew Perry

21. “My mind is out to kill me, and I know it. I am constantly filled with a lurking loneliness, a yearning, a clinging to the notion that something outside of me will fix me. But I had had all that outside had to offer!”

— Matthew Perry

22. “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.”

— Matthew Perry

23. “The thing is, if I don’t have sobriety, I don’t have anything.”

— Matthew Perry

24. “I don’t need to be reminded that I was on ‘Friends.’ I remember – some of it, anyway.”

— Matthew Perry

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

— Matthew Perry

26. “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.”

— Matthew Perry

27. “Nine times out of 10, women don’t want to fix a problem, they just want to be understood. I’ll never get that.”

— Matthew Perry

28. “In television or a movie I bring my own ego and consequently can mess up. In the theatre I learnt very quickly to shut up and listen. Now I am able to get out of my own way.”

— Matthew Perry

29. “Chandler’s the guy everybody thinks will do well with women, but he thinks too much and says the wrong thing.”

— Matthew Perry

30. “These men were not drinking to escape; they were drinking to overcome a craving beyond their mental control.”

— Matthew Perry

31. “Drinkers think they are trying to escape, but really they are trying to overcome a mental disorder they didn’t know they had.” Eureka! – someone understands me. But reading that was both wonderful and horrible. It meant I wasn’t alone – there were others who thought like me – but it also meant I was an alcoholic and would have to quit drinking one day at a time, for the rest of my life. How was I ever going to have fun again?”

— Matthew Perry

32. “I’m glad that life isn’t like a Christmas song, because if my friends and I were building a snowman and it suddenly came alive when we put a hat on it, I’d probably freak and stab it to death with an icicle.”

— Matthew Perry

33. “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.”

— Matthew Perry

34. “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.”

— Matthew Perry

35. “Martin Sheen turned to me and said, ‘Do you know what Saint Peter says to everyone who tries to get into heaven?’ When I looked blankly, the man who was once president said, ‘Peter says, ‘Don’t you have any scars?’ And when most would respond proudly, ‘Well no, no I don’t,’ Peter says, ‘Why not? Was there nothing worth fighting for?”

— Matthew Perry

36. “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.”

— Matthew Perry

37. “I got sober because I was worried I was going to die next year.”

— Matthew Perry

38. “If there’s a silence in a room I’ll try to fill it as soon as humanly possible.”

— Matthew Perry

39. “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.”

— Matthew Perry

40. “So I’m reading a book on my new iPad, but can’t the iPad read it for me? Do I have to do everything?”

— Matthew Perry

41. “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!”

— Matthew Perry

42. “I have what I like to call a ‘chinneck.’ My chin just flows rather easily into my neck.”

— Matthew Perry

43. “I don’t have a very ‘masculine’ taste in music. I get a lot of heat from my friends about that.”

— Matthew Perry

44. “In high school, my prom date fooled around with another guy – on prom night!”

— Matthew Perry

45. “If I could walk into the ‘Friends’ audition again and go or not go, I have to say it’s 50-50.”

— Matthew Perry

46. “I would like you all to give me a round of applause as I have not crashed my car in over 15 months.”

— Matthew Perry

47. “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.”

— Matthew Perry

48. “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.”

— Matthew Perry

49. “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.”

— Matthew Perry

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

— Matthew Perry