Bart Millard Quotes

I went to school for marketing for one year before I dropped out of college to make music.

I quit college. I was studying architecture for about a year.

I knew at university that medicine was just not for me. I saved many lives by not being a doctor!

I did a law degree but was miserable the whole time. I was supposed to join a law firm in London but instead went to Oxford to do a master's in philosophy.

You think you want to be an astronaut, and then after a while you're a geo-major for whatever reason. That's just the way it is in college.

If I'd stayed at college I would have become a teacher.

I only went to college for one semester, community college outside of Dallas. I got to the end of that and said, 'I'm not doing this anymore,' and moved to L.A. and landed a job.

I went to Carnegie Mellon for a year and a month or two, and then I dropped out because I got a movie. I didn't anticipate ever leaving school - I was a really serious drama student - and then that happened, and my life sort of took a turn.

I had been playing a lot of chess and I wasn't really enjoying it, so I decided to go to college to see what else is out there for me. But after about six or seven months away from the game, I just decided that the whole college life wasn't for me and that's why I decided to come back.

After Class 10, I kept away from films.

In my mid-twenties, I was with a conducting career, but I had never been to university and I wanted to. There were things I wanted to study in depth. I also wanted to see if I could survive without music.

It was a really long process, dropping out of college. I was there for a semester, then I would take a semester off and go on tour, then I would go back for a semester.

Most of my friends from college became dental hygienists or went into retail, a lot went into sales. They all started getting married and having kids and buying homes and I was still living like a college student.

I trained as a writer before I became a lawyer. I was headed for a life as an English professor, but that just wasn't me. I'm not a scholar; I didn't have a scholar's attitude toward literature.

I had been in a band in college. You kind of need to make a choice between going the music route or going the acting route. I chose acting, figuring I could always do the music on my own.

People don't really know themselves until they're 30. Like most people nowadays, I went to university, got a degree and wandered for a bit. I trained to be a chartered accountant, which I didn't much enjoy, and it was only slowly that the idea of becoming a creative writer gelled.

I went to the University of Arizona. I stopped because I went there for two years and I felt like I experienced college or whatever. I'm over it. I like Hollywood better.

I went to engineering school, which I thought was what I wanted to do, for about two weeks. We had an orientation class and we met this guy where he worked and stuff and it was cool, but I was like, 'There is no way this is going to be my life.'

I started a French degree at university, but packed it in when I realised I really wanted to be an actor.

By the end of high school, I had this fork-in-the-road moment where part of me considered going to vocational music school to really pursue it.

I dropped out of college for the last time in 1977.

That's the great thing about university: you've got people around you who are taking a risk and trying things out themselves. It gives you the confidence to try and take it to the next step, which was drama school.

I didn't want to be an accountant; I found myself being a banker, which was a bit different. I went to university, and I was going to do a Ph.D. in the States, but I didn't get the funding for it, so I had two years where I had a bit of a wobble and didn't really know what I wanted to do, and I ended up working as a banker.

After Brown, I went to Duke, to a Ph.D. program in American literature. My dad's an English professor. After a year there, I was like, 'Jesus. I don't want to do this. I don't want to be in the library.' So I pulled the ripcord, and that was it.

Being working class, my parents thought, 'Ian's going to uni, the first in the family,' and I'd do dentistry or accountancy. I was going to do accountancy; then I got a C in Economics and thought, 'Why am I doing this?' The only thing I was interested in was books and literature.