George Clooney's Mostly Gloomy Quotes on Marriage
His pessimistic outlook on marriage through the years belies rumored engagement.
April 28, 2014— -- The notorious Hollywood bachelor George Clooney, 52, has found love at last, despite his infamously pessimistic outlook on marriage.
And though he has yet to speak publicly about his rumored engagement to girlfriend Amal Alamuddin, perhaps we missed a few hopeful notes hidden in his love-related interviews through the decades.
WATCH: Longtime Bachelor George Clooney Gets Engaged
Clooney’s cynicism on marriage can be tracked as far back as a 1995 interview with ABC’s Barbara Walters. The exchange went like this:
Clooney: “I won’t marry again.”
Walters: “How do you know you won’t marry again?”
Clooney: “Because I wasn’t very good at it.”
Understandable, given that the actor had divorced his first and only wife to date, Talia Balsam, just two years earlier.
In an interview with Vanity Fair a year later, the actor reiterated his unsuitability for the hubby role:
"I probably, definitely, wasn't someone who should have been married at that point. I just don't feel like I gave Talia a fair shot. I was responsible for the failure of that marriage."
A decade later, the Academy Award winner seemed to be in higher spirits when he spoke to People, perhaps because he had just been named “Sexiest Man Alive” by the magazine.
"Marriage? Who knows? I've been married," he said. "It's not something I'm looking out for. Things could always change, but it's not a consideration right now.” Not necessarily the most hopeful outlook, but his uncertainty - “who knows” - is quite a shift from the certainty of “I won’t.”
Then, another downer in 2008: "I don't expect to ever get married again or have children,” he revealed to British newspaper Sunday People. “I am never at home and every woman gets sick of it. If I was them, I would never put up with me for long, and they don't."
He later reiterated the out-of-sight, out-of-mind theme.
In an essay for Esquire in 2011: "People forget that I was married. I love that, 'Will he get married?' I don't talk about it because I don't think about it.”
Hollywood Reporter in 2012: "I don't even think about it, really."
Perhaps it was a mechanism to ward off the unrelenting question, or maybe Clooney was ceding to the old line that “you find love when you least expect it.”
Still, we were pretty certain he was set in his bachelor ways after his interview with The Express earlier this year. "I keep saying I'll never get married again or have children but people just don't want to believe me," he said.
We’re glad we didn’t!