Brad Pitt is on the cover of Esquire Magazine‘s June/July 2013 issue!

Below are some highlights from the interview:

Brad says he’s happier than ever.

“I have very few friends. I have a handful of close friends and I have my family and I haven’t known life to be any happier. I’m making things. I just haven’t known life to be any happier.”

Brad gushes about his six children;  Maddox, 11, Pax, nine, Zahara, eight, Shiloh, six, and four-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne:

“I always thought that if I wanted to do a family, I wanted to do it big. I wanted there to be chaos in the house… there’s constant chatter in our house, whether it’s giggling or screaming or crying or banging. I love it. I love it. I love it. I hate it when they’re gone. I hate it. Maybe it’s nice to be in a hotel room for a day – “Oh, nice, I can finally read a paper.” But then, by the next day, I miss that cacophony, all that life.”

At 49, he knows what he wants. But it wasn’t always like that:

“I’d get so far and then want to do something else.  I mean, I’m two credits short of graduating college . Two credits. All I had to do was write a paper. What kind of guy is that? That guy scares me – the guy who always leaves a little on his plate.”

Brad believes his past recreational drug use did some “damage”:

“For a long time I thought I did too much damage – drug damage.  I was a bit of a drifter. A guy who felt he grew up in something of a vacuum and wanted to see things, wanted to be inspired. I followed that other thing. I spent years f***ing off. But then I got burnt out and felt that I was wasting my opportunity. It was a conscious change. This was about a decade ago. It was an epiphany – a decision not to squander my opportunities. It was a feeling of get up. Because otherwise, what’s the point?”

What Brad and Angie did after her surgeries:

“We set up our own little post-op recovery that became pretty fun. You make an adventure out of it. I’m quite emotional about it, of course. She could have stayed absolutely private about it and I don’t think anyone would have been none the wiser with such good results. But it was really important to her to share the story and that others would understand it doesn’t have to be a scary thing. In fact, it can be an empowering thing, and something that makes you stronger and us stronger.”