Rakim Quotes

I'm not shooting every day of the week, which allows me to fly home to be with my kids for the weekends. That's how I keep it moving.

Being with my kids is really important to me, being a good dad and being around a lot.

I dont work weekends. Weekends are for my kids. And I have dinner at home every night when Im not physically directing a movie - I get home by six. I put the kids to bed and tell them stories and take them to school the next morning. I work basically from 9.30 to 5.30 and Im strict about that.

I ordinarily do one film a year and the rest of the time I'm at home with the kids. Even when I am working I'm still basically at home and with the kids. I've never left them to go to work.

I was happy to spend time with my family, get to know my daughter, who was born during The West Wing. I missed her first words. I missed her first steps. I'd leave work before she woke up and got home after she was asleep and didn't really know her. So it was important for that reason to reintroduce myself to the family after all of that hard work.

I love my hockey, but if you can do that and go home and just be a dad and husband, then you have the best of both worlds.

I'm really focused on my research almost 100 percent. That, and my family and kids.

I stayed attached to baseball through the kids and through minor league baseball, and I'm very satisfied with the schedule it allows me to have, which means I'm home until my kids go off to college. I value that time.

I love that I can work from home and take my kids to school every day.

Family - and certainly kids and a stable relationship - is something bigger than yourself. They need you to sit down with them, be there for them when they wake up in the middle of the night.

Because I had the children, I chose to have my studio in my home. I wanted them to understand my work and learn how to work.

I am very lucky to have a wife who supports me, but the absence from my children was difficult from the moment I took a very difficult decision to have a career which requires so much dedication and focus, just like raising children.

Though I made my share of mistakes, as all parents do, I was devoted to my kids. I walked them to school every morning and walked back to pick them up at 3.

My real priorities were my family - my kids and Bruce - and my work with the E Street Band.

Away from football, it is just family. I try to spend time with my kids - I have to spend a lot of time away, so every time I am at home, I like to spend time with them.

When you're with your kids everything else takes a back seat.

I went home every night to New Jersey - or most nights - and to help with the six-grade math homework or to make breakfast in the morning, just to make sure that that was there. When I was single and didn't have children, I used to laugh at this notion of quality time.

When I confess a couple who have kids, a married couple, I ask, 'how many children do you have?' Some get worried and think the priest will ask why I don't have more. I would make a second question, 'Do you play with your children?' The majority say, 'but father, I have no time. I work all day.'

My dad worked every day. I didn't get into show business to work every day. So the fact that most days I get to like, spend really good time with my kids - that's what success is to me.

I spend a lot of time parenting because I'm home. A friend of mine told me that the average father sees each kid an average of twenty-two minutes a week, which I found almost unbelievable. Mine are in my hip pocket all the time. And I like it that way.

I can do short jobs. If I was still starring in three movies every year, there's no way that I'd be the person my kids want when they fall down.

The real challenge is when I'm at work, I'm at work. I'm locked in, I'm ready to go, I'm focused. When I'm at home, I'm locked in and I'm ready to go and I'm focused on home. We don't watch the show. We don't watch the news. We don't do any of that stuff. I sit down, I play Barbies. And sometimes the kids will come home and play with me.

Being a Daddy is priority number one. When you are old and facing oblivion in a nursing home or a hospital or on a golf course in winter, you are not going to wish you had spent more time at the office or making a sales call or watching a show. You will wish you had spent more time with your family.

My kids are in school and in all these clubs - chess club, fashion club, you name it. When my dad came home from work, it was late, and when he left, it was early in the morning. On my days off, I'm still taking my kids to school and picking them up. I do what I have to do to keep that relationship.

I'd love to do some bedtime stories for kids or that kind of thing. But with the demands of the shooting schedule and balancing the demands of being a single mother, it's a wonder you can squeeze in anything.