Quote collection
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"Puberty was definitely difficult for me. I remember my friends and I looking forward to puberty because it seemed exciting at first. You read Judy Blume and you think, "This is kind of cool." But when it actually started happening to me, I was terrified."
"I watched the video [ with my first commercial] when I was 20, and in the video, there are two families. The first family is this smiling blond Partridge family, a Californian/Aryan kind of thing, all playing guitars, all singing together and harmonizing. And then, there's my family - and in my family, it starts with my mom saying that she feels like a drill sergeant sometimes, and she's yelling at one of my brothers to stop hitting another one of my brothers. It's just like, "Great, we're that family." It felt a little Simpsons versus Flanders."
"I didn't trust adults because I thought they were all kind of corrupted."
"I didn't want to be a former child actor for the rest of my life, although in some ways I suppose I am. I am going to be that."
"I've been accused of being pretentious and insufferable, and I don't really know what I can say about that. I never got good grades in school, but I did read the dictionary for fun. That was just the kind of stuff that I liked to do. I can't apologize for that."
"If I ever have children of my own, they will read Matilda. They will watch the movie. And you can bet they will see Matilda: The Musical."
"My mother died when I was young, and I was filming all the time. I was all over the place. Acting was the one constant."
"It is strange to have everybody in the world still think of you as a child."
"David Sedaris wrote in one of his books that people like to make children into little grown-ups, which to him is about as funny as a dog in sunglasses."
"There were things that I knew that I was going to keep to myself."
"Children change a lot in terms of personality. Camaraderie that you feel with somebody might not be there a year later. That group might not have the same chemistry. So I completely understand why they're rushing into it, because they probably feel like they have to."
"The Hollywood stuff in the book tended to come later. I think it was because I was worried about leading with that stuff. I wanted to try to make sure that the other stories in the book were as interesting. I wanted to spend more time on them and craft them. The thing is, with writing, it's form or content."
"Whereas when I was a teenager, other teenagers didn't want anything to do with me. It was even like that in college to a degree. People of that age don't want anything to do with their childhood, because they had put away childish things, and they're trying to distance themselves."
"I thought I started acting at 5 or 6, it was really when they were interviewing real families for a toothpaste commercial. They interviewed our family."
"I would go to the craft services table and have Oreos or whatever, and a grown woman would come up to me and look at what I was eating and sigh and go, "I remember the days when I could eat like that." And I never knew what to say that, because I was 9."
"I had so many adults around me reminding me that I was a kid. I also had a lot of adults saying things to me like, "When I was your age..." and sort of idealizing it. I didn't like that they idealized it."
"When my oldest brother started acting. From there, I wanted to act myself. That's the long story short."
"It definitely is something that can get frustrating, because you want to live life on your own terms, and it feels for a while like you can't. But I've come to understand that I got to have all these amazing experiences that other people don't have. So this is the trade-off."
"There's a reason that girls cut off all their Barbie doll's hair and dye it and do things like that. I destroyed my Barbie dolls, and I know other girls did as well. And that's kind of the way they see kids movies and child actors in kids movies, as something that you've moved on from. It's babyish."
"Sure, I love to read, and I love to learn, but I was always nerdy that way."