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I think some cases are different than others, but all of the child actors that I have encountered, as well as myself, are real kids. I mean we do all the things that kids do. We're normal. We just like to do different things. We like to act and make people feel happy or sad, but we're 'real' people.

A lot of child actors keep acting for the wrong reasons.

A lot of the time with child actors, you get the feeling they're trying to have a kind of poise or presentation that's beyond their years that might be put on, but also might be because they've spent years just hanging out with adults and they don't even have a sense of what it's like to grow up with kids their own age.

After all these years in the business, I really feel that actors are used. People treat actors worse than they treat children. It's always, 'Do me a favor,' it's always, 'Help me out,' it's always, 'You carry the load,' and then they don't want to admit what you've done.

When you're a child, you're able to assimilate so easily into any situation. You even start talking like the people you're around. I wasn't conscious that I was so good at that until I started to truly feel like an actor.

With acting, you see some of the kids are literally just off the street, untrained, and they are great. And others are off the street, untrained, and kind of horrible.

Children are often better actors than adults because they have a greater capacity for believing in a situation.

At times, I feel sorry for kids who have succumbed in some kind of way to being a child actor.

As a child, acting just seemed like a natural extension of my love of play - and if you've forgotten how to play, you shouldn't be an actor.

Acting is a hard way to make a living, and there's a kind of dark, somewhat seedy side to the whole aspect of fame and celebrity that's not really something I would want for my child - or want him to want, if that makes any sense.