Fatherhood Quote by Richard Dean Anderson

Fatherhood, in Anderson's telling, doesn’t make work nobler; it makes it louder. The line turns the usual celebrity-patriarch script inside out. Instead of “my child inspires my craft,” he offers a blunt, almost guilty inversion: the baby is the reason he comes to work, and also the reason he wants to leave it. That tension is the point. He’s describing not a spiritual awakening but a new, practical math of time.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “Get out of here faster. Get off the clock.” That’s working-class language smuggled into a Hollywood mouth, and it matters. Acting, especially for a long-running TV star like Anderson, is a job that pretends not to be one: glamorous, privileged, supposedly fueled by passion. By framing it in terms of punching out, he punctures the mythology and admits what parenthood does to priorities: it makes even a dream gig feel like something that steals hours from the real center of your life.

There’s also subtextual self-defense. “I don’t know if this is a change” sounds like someone anticipating judgment - as if wanting to leave work early might be read as laziness or ingratitude. He preemptively claims moral cover: the baby makes him show up, but the baby also makes him restless once he’s there.

In a culture that romanticizes overwork and treats public men’s parenting as optional, Anderson’s candor lands because it’s unheroic. He’s not selling sensitivity; he’s confessing impatience, and that honesty feels oddly radical.