There's something that happens in that delivery room, when a woman becomes ten times more a woman, and a guy becomes six times less a man. You feel really dopey and useless and like a spectator. I did, anyway.

When people talk about wanting to have children someday, what they really mean is that they want babies. Nobody wants an angry adolescent. Nobody wants an obnoxious seven-year-old trying to wear out dirty words they just learned in school that day. What they really want is cute, adorable babies who love you and need you. The bad stuff is just the price you agree to pay for having the good stuff.

There's something very refreshing about being on stage.

I've come to realize that making it your life's work to be different than your parents is not only hard to do, it's a dumb idea. Not everything we found fault with was necessarily wrong; we were right, for example, to resent, as kids, being told when to go to bed. We'd be equally wrong, as parents, to let our kids stay up all night. To throw out all the tools of parenting just because our parents used them would be like making yourself speak English without using ten letters of the alphabet; it's hard to do.

The most challenging part of being a dad is trying to postpone the moment when they realize you don't know anything. I love any sentence that begins with Daddy...? because it's implied they're looking up to you - that you'll have the answer. The truth is, I don't have any answers.

Why do you think people close their eyes when they kiss? Think about it. In the real world, if you saw someone an-inch-and-a-half away, coming at you with their eyes open and their lips puckered, you'd scream. It's alarming.

I'm not smart enough to write about something that didn't actually happen to me. But I couldn't write a space movie if you put a gun to my head.