Randy Houser Quotes

You know, I think becoming a parent has really changed the way that I feel impacted by what's going on in the world around me.

When I travel with my kids abroad, I am not myself, but I'm more a father who wants to protect them. Sometimes, I am even aggressive about certain things and get surprised seeing myself like that: for instance, when people want to take pictures of them. I am fine if they want to take my pictures, but they are not public property.

There are thus great swathes of the past where understanding is more important and reputable than judgement, because the principal actors performed in line with the ideas and values of that time, not of ours.

Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but, unlike charity, it should end there.

In all seriousness, it really should be difficult for me to be too strange. After all, a great family raised me.

I think the sensitivity that you need to create certain things sometimes would spill over into things that shouldn't have bothered me.

I feel simultaneously completely vulnerable and made wholly brave by becoming a parent. It has changed the way that I live my life. Because I want to be an example for my son.

What I continue to learn as a parent is to be mindful of the fact that I am responsible for being the parent that my children need me to be and not necessarily the parent I want to be.

I used to be a bit of a show-off at school, but I've calmed down now and learnt to censor myself.

I would never sing a song which I cannot sing in front of my family.

I should be better with my grammar and set a better example for my kids. Just not sure that ain't gonna happen.

I feel, as I get older and now a father, I try to be a little more conscious of the things I would say and do. I try to be more creative as opposed to using a cheap word, cursing, or something vulgar to get a reaction.

I was raised in a home where we grew up where we discussed issues. I've always been really politically aware. My wife and four kids are very aware. They make me more attuned to a lot of things I would not think about. Especially women's issues.

I learned in school that money isn’t everything. It’s happiness that counts. So momma sent me to a different school.

I'm a good Indian girl, I still don't do sex scenes in my movies because my mum would kill me!

As you get older, your songwriting starts to become less and less about you, and especially when you have kids and a family. You start to see the world through other people's eyes a lot more to the point where it's hard to go back and relate to that "me against the world" perspective that I think a lot of my earlier songs were about. It's not so much about "me against the world," it's, how do you make the best possible future for your kids to grow up in?

There is but one way to eliminate juvenile delinquency - that is by providing each child in America with competent parents.

We pass our values, ideas and moral character on to our children, but we do that knowing that our children are going to revise our knowledge and reshape their values. There's something very paradoxical and profound about being a parent as opposed to parenting. We put in all this effort and energy not so that we can shape a child of a particular sort, but so that all sorts of possibilities can happen in the future.

My daughter introduced me to myself.

I put my children first, but I always keep my obligations or my commitments. You really have to do some internal work to know yourself, know what you're capable of. See how many meetings you can take a day or how much work you can get through in a day. Give it lots of proper time and respect, but also give yourself the respect of having your downtime, whether that means yoga, pilates, a meditation class, or a cooking class.

When your children arrive, the best you can hope for is that they break open everything about you. Your mind floods with oxygen. Your heart becomes a room with wide-open windows. You laugh hard every day.

Nudity in photography, whether involving adults or children, is a subject sinking under a freight of political and moral disapproval it could never hope to support, and this is not the place for me to get out the bilge pump. I will only say that critics who tremble so fiercely at the thought of the voyeuristic male gaze miss the point that distance generates mystery and enchantment, and expresses the awe with which the male imagination regards all women.

Once you're a parent, male or female, every single thing that happens in your life is seen through the prism of being a parent.

All I've ever wanted to do was be a great dad, and yet there's no stopping this existential mirror that's held up to yourself when you're about to have a kid.

I've been a dad since I was nineteen, so I think a lot about fatherhood and the power of that sacrifice in your life.