Mara Elizabeth Wilson is an American actress and writer. She rose to prominence as a child for playing the role of Natalie Hillard in the film Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), and went on to play Susan Walker in Miracle on 34th Street (1994), Matilda Wormwood in Matilda (1996), and Lily Stone in Thomas and the Magic Railroad (2000). Wilson retired from acting in 2000 to focus on writing, and later returned to acting in 2012. This Mara Wilson quotes will motivate you.
Best Mara Wilson Quotes
- “If I were really really ridiculously wealthy, I wouldn’t buy a mansion, just tiny apartments in every city I love.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “Very sad, very upset, very glad I did not have to hear about this through Twitter. Probably going to be taking some time off it for a while.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “I didn’t trust adults because I thought they were all kind of corrupted.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “It is strange to have everybody in the world still think of you as a child.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “Actually, I do like pink clothes, but it’s not because I’m girly, it’s because I’m the reincarnation of Oscar Wilde.” ~ Mara Wilson
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“If you can affect someone when they’re young, you are in their heart forever.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “I’ve always really loved stories told from the point of view of children.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
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“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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
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“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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
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“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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
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“Children change a lot in terms of personality. Camaraderie that you feel with somebody might not be there a year later.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
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“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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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?”” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “I was never a prodigy. I was never a child genius.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “Sure, I love to read, and I love to learn, but I was always nerdy that way.” ~ Mara Wilson
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“People think I’m smarter than I am.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “I’m surprised by how much I remember.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “Of course I didn’t have a boyfriend then. I didn’t even have a camp boyfriend then [at age of 13].” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “I remember my friends and I looking forward to puberty because it seemed exciting at first.” ~ Mara Wilson
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“Puberty was definitely difficult for me.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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].” ~ Mara Wilson
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“When my oldest brother started acting. From there, I wanted to act myself. That’s the long story short.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson quotes
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
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“There were things that I knew that I was going to keep to myself.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “I guess I was a philosophical child.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “I thought children were pure and innocent, and that was inherently better.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
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“I was very aware of being younger than everybody on set.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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?” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “People view child actors the same way that girls treat their Barbie dolls.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
- “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.” ~ Mara Wilson
