Meryl Streep Quotes

Instant gratification is not soon enough.

My success has depended wholly on putting things over on people, so I'm not sure that I'm that great a role model. I am, however, an expert on pretending to be an expert on pretending to be an expert.

True freedom is understanding that we have a choice in who and what we allow to have power over us.

You have to embrace getting older.

As there begins to be less time ahead of you, you want to be exactly who you are, without making it easier for everyone else.

The first thing [in career and motherhood] is a great husband. That I found many years ago and I am lucky in that way.

Everyone is interesting. Everyone has something unexpected to offer and the job of acting is to pull it out of each other.

If everybody that had two cars had a Prius instead of an SUV, we wouldn't be in the Middle East right now.

You can be afraid in a press conference, nervous, sweaty, but you can't be afraid when you do your work because it doesn't work that way.

I can become you for a second and you can become me and this lifts us up.

First I'm going to thank Don because when you thank your husband at the end of the speech they play him out with the music and I want him to know that everything I value most in our lives you've given me.

In other characters, it's driven by insecurity, or it's driven by fear, or - there's always a driver. And all the physical manifestations, you need your way in.

People want what they want. Sometimes you just have to walk in defiance of it and just be yourself.

That is the simple secret. Always take your heart to work.

Well, I got better after this, and my entire family really did appreciate it. Usually, they're resentful of movies that I go off and make, but this one had a bonus attached. But yeah, she had no breath.

I've grown up well, partly because there weren't great girls' literature - Nancy Drew, maybe - but there weren't things. So there was Huck Finn and "Spin And Marty." The boys characters were interesting and you lived through them when you're watching it.

You can't get spoiled if you do your own ironing.

The thing that you have to fight the most when you lose is you feel like the biggest failure in the world.

Take your heart to work and ask the most and best of everybody.

I've thought a lot about the power of empathy. In my work, it's the current that connects me and my actual pulse to a fictional character in a made up story, it allows me to feel, pretend feelings and sorrows and imagined pain.

Well, she's so alive, Julia Child. And Margaret is so - is so designed. She's so intent upon making her point. That's the most important thing, is that she win the argument, and there is nothing that stands in the way of that train, you know. But Julia's just alive in front of you. That's part of why people loved her. They lived it with her. They breathed it with her. And the mistakes were all part of it.

But for me, it [singing] was a way to get out the feeling of the song, and also to get out the feelings that, you know, roil in high school, to express something that I had no other way of expressing.

Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials.

My mother was someone that walked into a room and lit it up. She made friends easily and she communicated her enthusiasms with great joy. I always wanted to be more like my mother than I am. I loved and admired her very deeply.

It is interesting how fashion filters down and we discover in the "Devil Wears Prada" that we're all prey to trends, even if we think we are not.

There have been directors that I did not enjoy working with, but for the most part I realize that I have been unbelievably spoiled in my career because I have worked with some of the greatest, greatest directors ever.

Without question, of the heterosexual men that I've spoken to over the years, that's usually - they say, you know, my favorite thing you've ever done was Linda or Sophie. And they were a particular kind of very feminine, recessive kind of personality. So they fell in love with her, but they didn't feel the story through her body.

I wonder which of the megaton bombs Jesus, our President's personal savior, would have personally dropped on the sleeping families of Baghdad?

That's my way in the very beginning - how to enter it [a role]. Very quickly in the process, I don't think about voice being separate from the way you hold your head or the way you sit or the way you put on lipstick. It's all a piece of a person, and it's all driven by conviction.

I own one pair of Prada shoes. They make my feet hurt... It's not the shoes' fault; they are exquisitely made. I blame my feet. I've got my mother's feet.

If you have been touched by the success fairy, people think you know why. People think success breeds enlightenment and you are duty-bound to spread around like manure. Fertilize those young minds!

I have a very good life - I'm lucky enough not to be deprived.

Being a celebrity has taught me to hide but being an actor has opened my soul.

I couldn't care less about fashion. If I had taken any clothes home, they would have remained in my closet for the rest of their existence.

And it interferes with your ability to be a good actress if you're constantly aware of yourself as a person. To me, it isn't valuable to think about how I'm coming off all the time if I'm trying to create a character, because that's a process that I love. It's like falling in love and surrendering to another person or a character.

You win an Oscar, it can double the audience that you had before.

Well my favorite is really really sharp, extra sharp, aged cheddar cheese.

I love Goodfellows and I love Nick Palleggi, but no, it's The Godfather, 1 and 2.

They were showing clips from my earlier films. All I could see was this beautiful young woman who was anxious about whether she was too heavy or if her nose was too big. I felt like saying to her, 'Just relax and it will all be OK.

My own sense of well-being and purpose in the world. That comes from studying the world feelingly, with empathy in my work. It comes from staying alert and alive and involved in the lives of the people that I love and the people in the wider world who need my help.

Put blinders on to those things that conspire to hold you back, especially the ones in your own head.

One must be brave if one is to take the wheel.

One of the most important keys to acting is curiosity. I am curious to the point of being nosy. What that means is you want to devour lives. You're eager to put on their shoes and wear their clothes and have them become a part of you. All people contain mystery, and when you act, you want to plumb that mystery until everything is known to you.

The minute you start caring about what other people think, is the minute you stop being yourself.

When criticism comes your way as an actor they are not criticizing your writing or your painting or your piece, they are criticizing you! It is hard to put that away in a place where you are not hurt.

I think that we pay much more attention to fashion and our hair, skin and foreheads, our abdominal muscles and shoes than what is happening in the world. We willingly take that 'drug' and go along with that.

The progression of roles you take strings together a portrait of an actor, but it's a completely random process.

Integrate what you believe in every single area of your life. Take your heart to work and ask the most and best of everybody else, too. Don't let your special character and values, the secret that you know and no one else does, the truth - don't let that get swallowed up by the great chewing complacency.