Peter Gallagher Quotes

I had grand visions of being in professional sports. But when reality set in, I went, 'Oh, OK. I'll just move to Hollywood and be an actor.' I didn't want to look back on my life and wonder, 'What if I had done this? Or I had done that?'

I worked in accounting for two and a half years, realized that wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, and decided I was just going to give comedy a try.

It was easy for me to leave acting for school, because I wasn't really in it as an adolescent for fulfilling reasons.

I don't regret giving up football for acting. I love football and am very proud I played for Morton. But the truth is, I wasn't going to get much higher in football. At the same time, I sensed I could go somewhere in acting. I'm 28, which is young for acting, whereas in football I'd now be near the end of my career.

I started with the firm conviction that when I came to the end, I wanted to be regretting the things that I had done, not the things I hadn't.

I would have gone to law school, or gotten a psychology degree. I wasn't interested in sleeping on a futon forever. And what happened is I walked into auditions, and I had nothing to lose, because I had a backup plan.

I don't have any regrets. When I quit college and moved to Los Angeles to become an actress, it was so that I would not look back and have any regrets.

I would hate to look back on my life and go, 'You know, I wanted to do a rock n' roll album. I should have, and I never did.'

The truth is, I should have never done teaching. I did teaching because I didn't have the bottle to have a go at comedy. Whether there's any gain to comedy is not for me to say. But certainly it was no loss to teaching.

Life is too short to be scared and not take risks. I'd rather be the person that's like, 'I messed up,' than, 'I wish I did that.'

I would rather regret the things that I have done than the things that I have not.

I'm in the very fortunate position as a young actor to not have to take the first job that comes along. I'm not motivated by money at this stage in my life, I'm motivated by work.

All my graduation money went to paying for bartending classes so I could have a side gig. I bartended for two months before I was supposed to move to New York and then two months later I got the job as an understudy in 'Sister Act' and haven't looked back since.

As we grow older I always think, why didn't I do more when I was young, why didn't I risk more?

When I was in college, I was debating to try my hand at show business, or to become a professor. I just thought of the risk of not going into show business and always wondering if I would've had a chance. Because that's where my real heart was.

If you don't take the chance to live life, what can you say at the end of it?

I feel that I've worked with a lot of interesting people, and I have no regrets. I'm just curious about what I might have done if I'd had people in my life then who did explain what the publicity game was.

I said, I'm on this TV show and I love doing it, but I don't want to be known always as the silly 'Scrubs' guy... So part of me was like, You know what? Life's short. Let's go for it.

I saw leaving college as an opportunity to do something different with my life. I always thought that becoming an academic was going to be my path.

Security is not the meaning of my life. Great opportunities are worth the risk.

I woke up on May 15, 1991, the day of my Barnard graduation, and I said to myself, 'By the end of today you will decide what you want to do with the rest of your life.'

There was a period when I'd just come out of college where I'd been playing classical guitar and I suddenly realised that it wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

I did 'Degrassi' for five years in Toronto, and I made the decision to quit the show to go to theatre school, which a lot of people thought I was really crazy to do, but it was one of those major decisions in my life that I haven't regretted - hopefully I won't! I really wanted to go to school.

I would hate to be 65 and think, 'What if I had tried to be an actor?'

I wanted to play professional hockey, man. But when I acted, I thought, 'Well, okay, maybe I do have something here.'