Noah Baumbach Quotes

We regret the things we don't do more than the things we do.

If she doesn't speak, she is making a choice. If she doesn't try, she can lose her chance forever. -An-mei

I'd rather end up wishing I hadn’t than end up wishing I had.

One thing I can tell you for sure is this: we only regret what we don't do in life.

I am told that you regret not what you did but what you didn't do; and so that's why I do everything, so as not to have any regrets.

You will have more regrets for the things you didn't try than the ones you tried and didn't succeed at.

We often regret we did not do otherwise, when that very otherwise would, in all probability, have done for us.

Regrets are born of paths never taken.

I feel like I missed out on the regular high school social life, but that's the way I chose to be.

While we ponder when to begin, it becomes too late to do.

If you think about the long term then you can really make good life decisions that you won’t regret later.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant loosing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Sometimes people think of actors as marionettes - everybody else makes the decisions for us - and, you know, really, making this decision [of which roles to take] is the only thing you lay claim to.

The sad truth is that opportunity doesn't knock twice. You can put things off until tomorrow but tomorrow may never come. Where will you be a few years down the line. Will it be everything you dreamed of. We seal our fate with the choices we take, but don't give a second thought to the chances we take.

I’ve learned in a hundred ways that I rarely regretted acting but often regretted NOT acting fast enough.

hen Baillie [Walsh, writer and director] wrote the movie for me I wasn't doing what I'm doing today, so when we actually came to make the movie it seemed silly to change it. But who knows? That's the way things go. What was interesting for me - and what was always interesting in the script - was that you've got someone who appears to have everything, or at least has the opportunity to have everything, and he's f**ked it up, or lost it.

You can't regret the life you didn't lead.

A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.

If you rely exclusively on the advice of others, you may make terrible mistakes. Your heart knows what you need. Other people have other agendas.

The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did.

I've never been offered a job that I turned down and regretted. I didn't have Stanley Kubrick offer me something and me say no.

Take the stupidest thing you've ever done. At least it's done. It's over. It's gone. We can all learn from our mistakes and heal and move on. But it's harder to learn or heal or move on from something that hasn't happened; something we don't know and is therefore indefinable; something which could very easily have been the best thing in our lives, if only we'd taken the plunge, if only we'd held our breath and stood up and done it, if only we'd said yes.

I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else's boat or you'll regret in in the morning.

The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces.

You mustn't regret decisions that you make. Because the decisions are made out of your gut in a way and you have to stick with them.