Mara Wilson Quotations

'Mrs. Doubtfire' is still a fun movie, and it's still fun to watch, but it is hard to watch myself sometimes. I get very critical. And people will say, 'Mara, you were five.' And I'm like, 'Yeah, but I still should have known better!' I'm a lifelong perfectionist, what can I say?

I think that when I was child, acting was mostly just a hobby for me. It was something that my parents encouraged me to think of the way that my brothers thought of their cross-country classes, or my little sister to dance classes and art classes, and it was something like that for me.

'Matilda' was my favorite movie to film and my favorite to watch, as well.

I would like people to know me for who I am, especially since I think people have a very skewed image of me. I was playing a lot of cute characters, a lot of little girls; I was objectified. And I don't want people to think of me as that because it's not who I am, and because I've seen a lot of hostility towards that image.

When people asked me what I was going to do when I grow up, I always said, 'I'm going to be a writer. I'm going to write screenplays. I'm going to write books. I'm going to write plays. That's what I'm going to do.'

Assume everything you put on the Internet can and will be seen not only by the person you're talking about, but your future romantic partners and bosses, too.

I've always been more of a nerdy, academic type. I loved 'Star Wars' growing up. I have three older brothers, so they were a big influence on me. We loved 'Danger Mouse,' and we love 'Monty Python'. We loved any kind of British comedy and 'Wallace and Gromit' and all of that stuff.

Acting is something I did when I was a kid. I do act sometimes in friends' projects, but when I do, it's just for fun. It is actually a hobby for me now. I do still love stage acting, but the day-to-day process of being an actor is so exhausting and so taxing.

The next time a former child star is in the news, look at the age at which he or she started performing. Then imagine making a life-changing decision at that age. Chances are good he or she wasn't the one who made it.

Not many child stars make it out of Hollywood alive or sane, and at any given time there are at least three former ones having very public breakdowns.

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.'

It is annoying when people call me Matilda instead of my name when they actually know my name, because you know, we are two different people. But what can you do?

I get a lot of "Shut up, Matilda." I probably get as many "Shut up, Matildas" as Wil Wheaton gets "Shut up, Wesleys." That was an actual line on his show, though.

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.

When my oldest brother started acting. From there, I wanted to act myself. That's the long story short.

People want to bring kids to their level, and they want to make it seem like kids have this thing. It's seen as funny to them.

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.

I've never considered myself cool, and I don't think I ever will be. Honestly, it's better that way. It's much less pressure.

I'm surprised by how much I remember [on childhood on film]. I think it's just because I had these interesting moments. Of course, you never know when they're interesting moments, but there was a lot of stuff that I remember and have attached significance to later. I remember enough. I remember highlights.

For me [being a kid actor], it's a bit like when you see your mom's friends, and they're like, "I remember when you were this big. You'll always be that cute little kid to me." It's like that times a thousand. Well, times a couple thousand.

It's a little bit annoying, because it feels like everybody's taking the power away from you. Everybody's taking your adult life away from you. On one level, I used to resent it.

I remember my friends and I looking forward to puberty because it seemed exciting at first.

People view child actors the same way that girls treat their Barbie dolls.

Do people think I'm cool because I was in a movie when I was a child? No. Well, maybe a little bit more than they used to. There's definitely a nostalgia factor.

When you're an actor, your body isn't your own. Your body is part of a tool that you use. Everybody else there is using you as a tool, so they have access to those things, too.

People like to make children into little grown-ups.

I've always really loved stories told from the point of view of children.

I didn't trust adults because I thought they were all kind of corrupted. I thought children were pure and innocent, and that was inherently better. I guess I was a philosophical child.

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.

I knew I didn't want to put anything down in writing about the first time that I had sex. I knew that I didn't want to do that.

The thing is, with writing, it's form or content. You need to write about something interesting or you need to write about it in an interesting way.

Nobody cares about that. I do have guys every now and then who say - it's always guys by the way, it's never women - who say, "You were my childhood crush, can we date?" And I'm like, "There's something kind of creepy about that. Do you hear yourself?"

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 was very aware of being younger than everybody on set.

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.

I'm in my late 20s, and people are coming around to it again. I think they're realizing how much this stuff affects them. I think all the time about how much Judy Blume affected me, or Beverly Cleary. And I think that now some people are starting to come around and get more of an appreciation for [my stuff].

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.

My grades in high school were not very good. I was that kind of perfectionist that figured if you can't do it perfectly, why do it at all? So my grades weren't great, but I feel like, is there any other way that I could have gotten into NYU? I don't know. I think that it definitely worked in my favor in some ways.

I was getting keys for my apartment, and I asked if I could get doubles, because I'm forgetful, and the woman there said, "Yeah, but it costs $5." I was like, "Oh, okay." But then she said, "Actually, you know what, I'm just going to give it to you for free. You were in that movie Mrs. Doubtfire, and that movie really helped me out in a time when I needed it. It got me through something, and it made me laugh when I needed to laugh.

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 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.

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.

I was such a nerd. It just wasn't something I would have wanted. And I didn't want to act like an adult.

I didn't want to whisper and giggle about [puberty] anymore. I felt incredibly self-conscious. I felt like I was losing myself, and I was losing who I was. And that really scared me.

I felt like I had to be conscious of myself as a girl for the first time. I had to be more feminine. I had to look a certain way. And it's something that you want to suffer in silence, but I would go onto movie sets and they would bring out bras that were basically binders, because there were continuity problems between months.

Puberty was definitely difficult for me.

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.

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.

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.

I was never a prodigy. I was never a child genius.

Sure, I love to read, and I love to learn, but I was always nerdy that way.

People think I'm smarter than I am.

You always worry that everybody is secretly talking about you behind your back, everybody is secretly making fun of your voice, your figure, the way that you are during puberty, but it turned out, in real life, everybody was. On movie sets, they were all talking about these things, because they had to.

A lot of child actors think they need to re-invent themselves, especially young women. Usually what they do is they adopt a sort of overt sexuality. It's fine if they want to do that, but a lot of times I think they feel obliged to do that, and that is something that I don't think anybody should feel obliged to express.

It is strange to have everybody in the world still think of you as a child.

I remember reading To Kill A Mockingbird when I was 12. What I liked about it is that it was all seen through a child's eyes. It was Harper Lee going back and writing it from the way a child would see those things.

People seem to forget what it was like to be a child. I think it's partly because they want to forget, because it usually wasn't as good as you thought it was, and so you want to skip over those things, and not have to relate to that anymore.

I can't even count how many times I did interviews with people and they asked me if I had a boyfriend. Keep in mind that I was, I guess, mild to moderately famous from ages 6 to 13. Of course I didn't have a boyfriend then. I didn't even have a camp boyfriend then.

I don't have any plans to pursue film acting. It's not my thing anymore, if it ever was. Yes, I do still act sometimes. But when I do, it's with people I know and trust, people who respect me as a person and appreciate what I have to offer.

I'd rather be known for my accomplishments, and for things that I really do take pride in, rather than known for this doll-like image I had when I was a child.

The best times I had on film sets were the times the director let me express myself, but those were rare.

It's easier to see children as mini adults than it is to imagine or to remember what it is to be a child again.

Danny DeVito later told me that he knew he wanted me for 'Matilda' the second I walked in the door. I'm not sure if this is true, or if he was just being nice, but I was thrilled when I got it.

I remember feeling enormous pressure because I didn't want to be Shirley Temple. Shirley Temple was Shirley Temple, and I didn't ever feel like I could live up to that.

I had people in 'Entertainment Weekly' talking about how they wanted to throttle me because they thought I was too disgustingly cute, as if that were my fault, you know, as if that was my fault, not the fault of directors and producers and such.

Of course I didn't have a boyfriend then. I didn't even have a camp boyfriend then [at age of 13].

If I were to talk to Lindsay Lohan, I'd encourage her to get the hell out of acting and into something soothing. Take up botany or something.

I'm originally from southern California, so I, like, say 'like', like, a lot. I've been trying to scrub any traces of Valley Girl from my speech since I moved to New York, but it's, like, totally way harder than anyone thinks, you know?

People who meet me as an adult are often surprised that I'm alive and have never been in prison or rehab. Sometimes they're disappointed I'm not cooler.

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.

Here is something no real celebrity will ever tell you: film acting is not very fun. Doing the same thing over and over again until, in the directors eyes, you get it right does not allow for very much creative freedom... In terms of sheer adrenaline, film has absolutely nothing on theater.

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.

If you can affect someone when they’re young, you are in their heart forever,

I don't know if I'm always going to be acting. Maybe when I grow up, I will be a scriptwriter. I already have a few scripts in my head.

There were things that I knew that I was going to keep to myself.

I consider my relationship with acting in Hollywood as sort of a mutual breakup. Through puberty, Hollywood didn't really want me anymore, and I was like, 'Yeah, I don't really want you, either.'

Film can be exciting, but more often, it's tedious.

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.

I guess I was a philosophical child.

I still get recognized. It's flattering, but it can be uncomfortable. Maybe because it only seems to happen when I'm looking and feeling crappy.

I think I might like to try film again just as an experiment, but I know that I could never do the mainstream thing again.

No, you will never see me on 'Dancing With the Stars.' Sorry.

I thought children were pure and innocent, and that was inherently better.

That's my suggestion for kids who want to act, by the way: Make sure it's really your choice, get out of it when it stops being fun, and get an education.

I'm pretty cautious and not very athletic, so I've only had really dumb injuries, like sprained ankles and allergic reactions. I did have to go to the hospital after slicing my finger while trying to cut a Kaiser roll in half.

I think if I could do it over again - as much as I loved meeting the people I did on the films after 'Matilda' - I wish that I had stopped after 'Matilda.' I wish that I had just focused on my own life for a while.

I didn't trust adults because I thought they were all kind of corrupted.

The celebrity aspect is nothing short of ridiculous, and auditioning is brutal and dehumanizing. Every time I see a pretty young girl on the subway reading sides for an audition, my only thought is, 'Man, am I glad I'm not doing that anymore.' I never feel nostalgia, just relief.

Actually, I do like pink clothes, but it's not because I'm girly, it's because I'm the reincarnation of Oscar Wilde.

Very sad, very upset, very glad I did not have to hear about this though Twitter. Probably going to be taking some time off it for a while.

I'm surprised by how much I remember.

I can't take much pride in my childhood acting. It feels like it happened in another lifetime, and even then, it felt like a hobby.

Considering all the legal hassle child stars can be, I won't be surprised when they are phased out by CGI children voiced by adult actors.

If I were really really ridiculously wealthy, I wouldn’t buy a mansion, just tiny apartments in every city I love.