Meryl Streep Quotes

I feel like I run a business although I haven't one. It's planning, planning, and planning.

People say, When you have children, everything changes. But maybe things are awakened that were already there.

I follow no doctrine. I don't belong to a church or a temple or a synagogue or an ashram.

My daughters had helped me to stop worrying about my appearance over the years. I wasted so many years thinking I wasn't pretty enough and why didn't I have Jessica Lange's body or someone else's legs? What a waste of time.

I'm a pain in the ass to all of the costume designers with whom I work because I have very strong feelings about the subject.

All that attention to the perfect lighting, the perfect this, the perfect that, I find terribly annoying.

The formula of happiness and success is just, being actually yourself, in the most vivid possible way you can.

Pretending is not just play. Pretending is imagined possibility. Pretending, or acting, is a very valuable life skill and we do it all the time.

I get nervous the more time I have to think about something so I deliberately don't give myself too much time between jobs. I take a big break and then I start working again usually.

We're viewed as equals - but we're still not there yet. The challenge for our girls, I think, is dealing with that resistance. How can we lift and defuse it, how do we make it so our equality is not so threatening? Our girls are going to have to contend with that. I contend with it right now in every realm I operate in.

For me, clothes are kind of a character. They're more interesting in those terms.

I have always regarded myself as the pillar of my life.

Every single decision I make about what material I do, what I'm putting out in the world, is because of my children.

I just think that we're all trying to make ourselves emaciated, in order to pretend that we're all disappearing, as we move forward in every level of society and it's so frightening. This is all a big reaction to the fact that there are more women in medical school than there are men now and I am pretty sure it will be the same soon in law schools and in business.

When I was in - at Vassar, and I came from a public high school in New Jersey, there was - that class still existed. I think it's pretty much gone, but there was a way of talking that the private school girls had that was different than the way I talked from New Jersey.

I'm never so sure as I was in my mid-20s.

I do think sometimes when scrolling through the TV and there's something on and I look at it and I think oh, my god. I thought I was fat? What is my problem?

I think the best role models for women are people who are fruitfully and confidently themselves, who bring light into the world.

I have a lot to say about the world, clearly. I can't put together a clear sentence about it all, but through the work I can say what I think.

In my own life, I have noticed when I have been meeting directors, that the same sentence with the same inflection can be said by a man, like: "Get me this." But if the same thing is said by a woman, it's seen as harsh and unacceptable. That always fascinates me.

I've been making a lot of pasta. It's easy. There are unusual tastes that you can combine. I cook because my kids like a certain kind of thing and then they want it over and over.

You know, you're not aware of it, but you're following the action of the film through the body of the protagonist, you know? You feel what he feels when he jumps, when he leaps, when he wins, when he loses. And I think I just took it for granted that, you know, we can all do that, but it became obvious to me that men don't live through the female characters.

There are some days when I, myself, think I'm overrated... but not today.

Empathy is at the heart of the actor's art.

My family really does come first. It always did and always will.

Everything that truly makes us happy is quite simple: love, sex, and food! Everything else - power, influence, strength - all those things can overpower what's important in life. But as long as you have food and shelter over your head, if the necessities are taken care of, what makes us happy on top of that is very simple.

I can't stand most things that I see.

I'm older. There's some sort of seniority. As a matter of fact, the seniority ebbs as you get older.

It's so much easier to be happy. It's so much easier to choose to love the things that you have, instead of always yearning for what you're missing, or what it is that you're imagining you're missing. It is so much more peaceful.

Tonight we light these candles to honor the value and the work of Jyoti Singh's short, promising life, she was India's daughter. Tonight she's our daughter too.

Some men can maintain cragginess and weary masculinity. Women just get old.

How do I do that preparation [for film]? Just an immersion. I have a musician's, I guess, ear for the sound of the voice but it's also important to me, in the case of [playing] someone who is controversial, to get the outlines of the character right because how they present themselves to the world has a great deal to do with how people feel about them.

I would say, don't smoke. I'm kidding, but yeah, I did smoke in college and as a young actor and it's stupid.

When my children were very young and I was working I had someone cooking for me. I don't have a cook now, I haven't had one for a number of years and I do it myself. But when they were all little it was hard to pay attention to everyone's homework at the end of the day and make dinner.

For me, clothes are kind of character; I don't follow fashion or understand trends.

If I am not confident that I can portray the character perfectly on screen, I won't even try.

The interesting thing about being a mother is that everyone wants pets, but no one but me cleans the kitty litter.

I think we all think we sound really good in the shower, where there's that nice reverb.

The work is the most fun; it seems illicit how much fun it is.

I have a holistic need to work and to have huge ties of love in my life. I can't imagine eschewing one for the other.

You can have a perfectly horrible day where you doubt your talent... Or that you're boring and they're going to find out that you don't know what you're doing.

People will say to me, ‘You’ve played so many strong women,’ and I’ll say, ‘Have you ever said to a man, “You’ve played so many strong men?”’ No! Because the expectation is [men] are varied. Why can’t we have that expectation about women?

Having been let out of the barn once, I know I wouldn't be happy if I were home all the time.

I get nervous calling myself an artist. I feel I'm more like an interpreter or a violinist, you know.

I guess a normal woman would find it extremely enjoyable to wear fancy clothes. For me, I didn't enjoy it. It felt like a straight jacket.

Teachers perform major miracles in America, daily.

The greatest gift given to man by God - is the ability to empathize.

Chris Cooper is one of my favorite actors in the world. I've seen him in most everything he's done.