Quotes from Haley Joel Osment

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.

You always have to avoid working for the sake of putting yourself out there.

I've never had a MySpace or a Facebook page. I avoid that entirely.

My dad never told me that when you audition, you might not get the role. He wanted to wait until my first disappointment to tell me.

What attracted me to New York was there was an anonymity that I couldn't always have in Los Angeles, and it was easier to blend in there. The more successful you are, the less you are able to do that.

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.

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

My parents are from the South - they were both born in Birmingham - so my dad saw R.E.M. really early on when they were playing college stuff in Athens. He had a bunch of their cassettes from the '80s, and when I was 8, 9, or 10, those were the sort of things that were around the cassette player in the living room.

Just keep learning from the role and not just go for the money.

Kobe Bryant is my favorite basketball player. He takes risks. He goes for the shot. He isn't cautious with whatever he does.

That professionalism comes from what I've watched people do on the set. I'm just trying to be as respectful to the environment, as they have been. I think I still act like a kid. I just try to be as professional as I can.

When I was five, I went on my first audition. It was for a Pizza Hut commercial.

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.

The best advice my dad ever gave me is that acting is believing. Acting is not acting. It isn't putting on a face and dancing around in a mask. It's believing that you are that character and playing him as if it were a normal day in the life of that character.

Acting is not acting. It isn't putting on a face and dancing around in a mask. It's believing that you are that character and playing him as if it were a normal day in the life of that character.

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.

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.

It's hard to act terrified when you have 200 crew members around you.

My favorite place is Central Park because you never know what you're going to find there. I also like that when I look out the windows of surrounding hotels, it's seems like I'm looking out over a forest.

I went to the Experimental Theater Wing at NYU and wrote and directed a small amount of stuff there.

One of the cool things about getting to audition for things on short notice is that it teaches you to memorize efficiently. So I've never been afraid of getting text down quickly.

I would be a terrible person to be in a relationship with because I'm either sleeping or at the theater.

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.

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.