Haley Joel Osment

My parents never got carried away with the extraneous elements of being in the business.

Comedy can be harder because if you aren't making the audience laugh, they're going to turn on you quicker. They'll go along with mediocre drama more than they'll go along with mediocre comedy.

A script like 'The Sixth Sense' is fun to read: It's so well-written, and you get a vivid sense of what's going to be onscreen.

People hear the examples of kids who work when they're young, have bad experiences, and then have a rough life after that, but a lot of it is just about the people around you.

My parents were both born in Birmingham, Alabama, and come from large Catholic families with lots of Michaels, Marks, and Patricks, so they wanted to choose two names that I don't think you could find anywhere else in the family tree: Haley and Joel.

There's so much to learn about acting and performance in general... I mean, acting is a very complex art, and there are a lot more theories and methods and techniques to it than I think anybody would think.

My mom teaches sixth grade and also taught first grade at one point. She's into dressing up and costumes and designing her own curriculum that way. She stayed home for about eight years with me and my sister when we were young before going back to teaching, so we had a lot of time with her. She taught us to read really early.

When you're a kid, and you grow up, it takes some time for people to associate you with more things other than that initial thing.

For me, choice is the most important thing because I'm going to be an adult actor pretty soon. So I've got to be choosing the right roles now so that by the time I get to that age there will be wide options available.

I had a flip phone until I was 25, and I didn't use social media until that age, either.

With my dad coming from a theatre tradition, there was a lot of preparation before auditions. Not just in terms of saying the lines correctly but a process of entering into what it was all about.

When you get lucky, as I did getting to work on a series of amazing films, one of the drawbacks career-wise is that the image of you at 10 or 12 or whatever is burned into people's minds for a long time.