Meryl Streep Quotes

She [Barbra Streisand] was just - we can't know what we mean to each other. You know, artists, you can't know - you can't know that, but she was really important.

I think the most liberating thing I did early on was to free myself from any concern with my looks as they pertained to my work.

The work itself is the reward, and if I choose challenging work, it'll pay me back with interest. At least I'll be interested, even if nobody else is.

I feel very strongly that we make decisions about what we're giving to the world, what we're withholding from the world, by virtue of what we put on our bodies.

Every easy choice will have its consequence tomorrow.

Acting is being susceptible to what is around you, and it's letting it all come in. Acting is a clearing away of everything except what you want and need - and it's wonderful in that way. And when it's right, you're lost in the moment.

Life is all about making choices and I'm very happy with mine. I have had a wonderful time raising four children and I've also been lucky to have the support of a wonderful husband.

It's very humbling to imagine somebody else's really life and their pain ... It's my drug.

How you first meet the public is how the industry sees you. You can't argue with them. That's their perception.

When your kids come home, they don't necessarily want to talk to you. They just want to know you're standing there, ready to talk.

Women are better at acting then men. Why? Because we have to be. If successfully convincing someone bigger than you are of something he doesn't want to know is a survival skill, this is how women have survived through the millennia.

Show business has been really, really good to me because I can work and take a lot of time off, and I'm extremely undisciplined person.

I think we reserve a special place in our hearts for women who dare to try and be powerful, or occupy a special elevated place in society or when they are 'the bosses'. I think we really don't like it as a society and we have a harsh view of them. We look much harder at them, than the millions of men who aspire to the same positions and I can't figure that out.

We change who we are to fit the exogenous of our time, and not just strategically or to our own advantage, sometimes sympathetically without our even knowing it for the betterment of the whole group.

I never look a gift horse in the mouth. And I've been really, really lucky. I'm aware of that. And my career has been given to me by the people I've worked with, no question. The actors, the directors, the cinematographers, the writers, all of whom gave me the opportunity to work in the way that I have and I'm really grateful.

We are the choices we have made.

It's sort of my fun to sing along with records and imitate people who are on the telephone that have different ways of speaking.

I thought, "Why? and how did we evolve with this weak, and useless passion in tact within the deep heart's core?" And the answer as I've formulated it to myself is that empathy is the engine that powers all the best in us.

What led me to that was I have never - I mean, I watch movies and I don't care who is the protagonist. I feel what that guy is feeling. You know, if it's Tom Cruise leaping over a building - I want to make it, you know? And I'm going to - yes, I made it. And yeah, so I get that.

For young women, I would say don't worry so much about your weight. Girls spend way too much time thinking about that, and there are better things. For young men, and women, too, what makes you different or weird-that's your strength. Everyone tries to look a cookie-cutter kind of way, and actually the people who look different are the ones who get picked up. I used to hate my nose. Now I don't. It's OK.

I need to go where people are serious about acting.

I don't have a favorite director just like I don't have a favorite color or I don't have a favorite food. I like everything.

Fear focuses the mind.

I would like Martin Scorsese to be interested in a female character once in a while, but I don’t know if I’ll live that long.

Sometimes it's easier for people who are in authority to be authoritarian, because people know where you stand.

We are who we're going to be when we're very old, and when we're very old we are who we were when we were 8.

You're perfectly balanced because then you effervesce seemingly effortlessly. And it's a thing a person can't manufacture. You either have that or you don't. You have charm or you don't.

My job is usually to express emotion as freely as possible.

I don't like to be gone all weekend and at night too. Because for 20 years, I've had children who are in school.

That consciousness of quality, and the need to demand it can galvanize your energies, not just in your work, but in a rigorous exercise of mind and heart in every aspect of your life.

Sometime really good writing does you a disservice as an actor. Because you can get lazy. It's doing a lot of the work for you. I guess that's good. But at the same time with material that's not so good, you have to be more inventive, because no thought has been applied to it.

They filled our lives so much, the films they were in made us laugh, think and cry. Through their work they shared a piece of our soul. We will miss them with the sadness with which we miss an old friend.

My feeling about fears is, if you voice your fears, they may come true. I'm superstitious enough to believe that.

On every film, the clothes are half the battle in creating the character. I have a great deal of opinion about how my people are presented. We show a great deal by what we put on our bodies.

It's amazing what you can get if you quietly, clearly and authoritatively demand it.

You don't have to be famous. You just have to make your mother and father proud of you.

If you have a brain, you are obliged to use it.

You have been told that Real Life is not like college, and you have been correctly informed. Real Life is more like high school.

What makes you different or weird, that's your strength.

The work will stand, no matter what.

You are thinking about where your brain is at any time. It's very tricky but it's why women are very well suited to rule the world in the future, because of the multi-tasking they do and their ability to be moving in 15 directions at once. It's the women who behave like men, who focus in that singular way with the blinkers on, who have problems. You get a lot more done that way maybe, but you also lose the perception of who's behind you, what's going on, the 360 degrees of it, the whole picture of life that we do have as women.

You didn't have to work to keep your fear up, your energy up, or your anxiety. It is all kind of built into the process.

I never thought I was somebody that would be on the cover of magazines in fashions, wearing fashions. It's like not me. But that is what movie stardom entails.

Some people are filled by compassion and a desire to do good, and some simply don't think anything's going to make a difference.

And she [Margaret Thatcher] also had a sort of a way, like a railroad train, of going, taking a breath and starting quite quietly and making a point in a way that you don't really know that this point is going to be made through several examples, and there will be not be a break in the speaking voice at any point.

Everything we say signifies; everything counts, that we put out into the world. It impacts on kids, it impacts on the zeitgeist of the time.

I didn't go to Catholic school but I had a tough teacher, a tough math teacher.I remember everything that guy taught me. I really do.

And it took to "The Devil Wears Prada" to play someone tough, who had to make hard decisions, who was running an organization, and sometimes that takes making tough decisions for a certain kind of man to empathize. That's the word - empathize. Feel the story through her. And that's the first time anybody has ever said that they felt that way.