Jason Isaacs
English actor
I wouldn’t have spent so much time trying to be a professional skateboarder or snooker player.
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
Question
What does love feel like?
Relationships
Question
What has been your biggest disappointment?
Failure & regret
Question
Who most deserves an apology from you, and why?
Failure & regret
Question
What keeps you awake at night?
Daily life
Question
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
Daily life
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Repeated verbatim in The Guardian's long-running Saturday Q&A; two publisher-hosted examples establish recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I would have been a better listener. I would have pursued more friendships instead of focusing so much on work and myself. I’m doing all that now, but I’m running out of time.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 26 October 2019 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 207 →
Sadiq Khan
Mayor of London since 2016
I would have had more time with my dad before he passed away.
Adam Lambert
American singer
I would try to work on being able to trust people more easily.
Ian McEwan
British novelist and screenwriter
To have grown up with my siblings. They were at least 10 years older than me.
More from Mandy Patinkin
View profile →Love is a religious experience, which then requires me to define religion, which I define as everything I don’t understand.
Citizens around the world blaming others for their personal disappointments, othering them, labelling them, terrorising them with hate-filled rhetoric and shutting the doors of their hearts.
To my father, for not telling him the truth when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and going along with the family lie that he had hepatitis, when he knew he didn’t. At the age of 17, I lacked the courage and strength to stand up for what I believed.
Not being at peace with myself, in spite of an ongoing lifetime effort to try to calm down and accept that, no matter what, I did the best I could.
Less work, more living.
More on failure & regret
- What has been your biggest disappointment? 372 answers
- Who most deserves an apology from you, and why? 209 answers
- What is the worst thing anyone has said to you? 125 answers
- Which moment embarrassed you most? 125 answers
- How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure? 80 answers
- What is the hardest thing that has happened to you, and what did you carry out of it? 40 answers
Also answered this
David Harewood, Isla Fisher, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Julian Clary, Omid Djalili, Charlotte Church
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All failure & regret questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject