Craig T. Nelson

“Being a father of three children and grandfather to nine, I do think that this thing called 'parenting' is becoming increasingly difficult.”

“I worry about making work more important than what I know to be the truth. Throughout all areas of life, we're told how to look, how to act, what to speak, what to wear, what we should have and other people don't have, and we know none of that means anything. Yet these other messages never stop coming.”

“I've been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No. No. They gave me hope, and they gave me encouragement, and they gave me a vision. That came from my education.”

“I had a '56 Ford, and my first car was a '49 Chevy. I converted it to a stick and used to race with the other high school kids down along the river.”

“No one is accountable anymore for anything.”

“Education to me is the most important thing that we've got going in this country. I mean, a lot of my family are teachers. I was the recipient of a great public education, and I see that's one of the first things that we're going to go, 'What are we going to raise?' The ignorant masses.”

“I mean, a lot of my family are teachers.”

“Sometimes you're encouraged, and other times disappointed. It's a matter of going in and precluding all that with, 'This is what I do, not who I am.' I need to be who I am in the process of doing what I do. I need to stay true to what it is I'm really here for. And that's the hardest thing, the biggest challenge.”

“You can only do so much grunting and groaning and then you're done, you know?”

“I lost my parents when I was fairly young.”

“My youngest son is a writer. He wrote for 'The District' and 'CSI: NY.'”

“The beauty of 'Parenthood' is that it's a blue-collar working family, and it reflects attitudinal shifts that occur within people and families.”

“What it takes just to earn a living - working two or three jobs - is driving a wedge in families that shouldn't be there.”

“I really want to drive a Porsche GT1 car - also a McLaren, if I could fit. I want to do LeMans badly. I want to do Spa, a European series with World SportsCars.”

“When you're doing Sebring in the back straight at 185 or 187, and the car's moving, you gotta know what to do with it, how to read it. Just the science of understanding shocks - forget spring rates - is mind-boggling.”

“I want to see my kids grow up in a world that I grew up in, which was it had imagination and it had hope. And all of a sudden, I see that being dissolved, and I see, as a country, as a people, we are a republic. We are a democracy.”

“I really wanted to do 'Modern Family,' and I really liked the script, and I liked the people.”

“Lance Armstrong is the guy that I would put up there as one of my heroes. He's done something that no one else has done and when you put into it what he overcame, it's absolutely unbelievable.”

“No one is accountable anymore for anything. No one did anything wrong. Well, you're to blame. That's to blame. This is to blame.”

“When there's that forgiveness present and compassion, it just helps you live so much easier.”