The greatest thing about having a child is putting yourself second in your own life. It's a massive gift to be able to say you're not the most important person to yourself.
It's hard having kids because it's boring... It's just being with them on the floor while they be children. They read Clifford the Big Red Dog to you at a rate of 50 minutes a page, and you have to sit there and be horribly proud and bored at the same time.
I used to like people more, but now I have children and that changes your life in a lot of ways. Like you spend time with people you never would have chosen to spend time with, not in a million years. I spend whole days with people, I'm like, "I never would have hung out with you. I didn't choose you. Our children chose each other based on no criteria by the way. They're the same size. They don't care who they make me hang out with."
One time I was at a swimming pool with my kids, a public pool. I had my daughter, my six year old, on my arm like this. She was like clamped on, and she's kicking. ... And then she got off and another random child just clamped on. It's like a rat. "Get off of me." "But I love you." "I don't know you, kid."
Television for a child creates such a high bar of stimulus that nothing else competes. A beautiful day is absolute crap to a kid who watches tv.
I did a show in New Jersey in the auditorium of a technical high school ... Technical high school, that's where dreams are narrowed down. We tell our children, "You can do anything you want." Their whole lives. "You can do anything!" But this place, we take kids - they're 15, they're young - and we tell them, "You can do eight things. We got it down to eight for you."
A very painful part of being a parent is having really negative feelings about your children when you love them so much.
Some people think it's demeaning to victims if you ever say anything out-loud about sexual abuse of children. I don't know if that's true.
I'm not raising the children, I'm raising the grown ups that they're going to be.
