"Acting requires some intentionality on the part of the actor, some conscious effort to adopt a persona other than his or her own."

"Even adult actors who get criticized for 'playing themselves' are engaged in a series of more or less conscious decisions about how best to be themselves onscreen."

A young child, meanwhile, likely isn't thinking at all about how to be herself, let alone a character. She's a kid, and she just "is." This is, of course, a big part of what we're responding to when we watch Wallis: her innocence and her lack of self-consciousness. She feels genuine precisely because she's incapable of being otherwise.

From an article in The Atlantic a month ago titled "Sorry, Quvenzhané Wallis, but Best Actress Oscar Nods Are for Big Kids."

This morning, Quvenzhané Wallis got that Best Actress Oscar nod.

I loathe movies that exploit our instinctive urge to protect and care for children. The child is automatically that sweet and innocent character, whom the author sadistically torments for our sick pleasure.

"Be a Sadist."

Rule #6 on Kurt Vonnegut's 8 rules for writing a short story:

No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

This is a problem I have with fiction. Characters are created for you to care about and the author invents torments for them — for us to enjoy. Have you ever written a fictional story and experienced sick excitement as you contemplated what you were about to do that poor unsuspecting sympathetic character you created? Or do you only read fiction. If you're able to get into fiction, is it because you fully trust the author to deliver the titillation of bad things happening to this sweet leading character?

This is a line of thought that brings me back around to an opinion I've arrived at from other directions as well: Give children nonfiction to read.

"As for your term papers, I should like them to be both cynical and religious."

"I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be."

Kurt Vonnegut, to his Iowa Writers' Workshop class in 1965 (reprinted in this collection of his letters).