Meryl Streep Quotes

Everyone tries to look a cookie-cutter kind of way, and actually the people who look different are the ones who get picked up.

When I was younger I spent way too much time thinking about me being too fat. So stupid.

I always feel like I can't do it, that I can't go through with a movie. But then I do go through with it after all.

What's worse than brutality that dehumanizes women? Tolerance and indifference towards it.

I don't have very much interest in trends and fashions. I don't follow the fashion shows and stuff like that into my real life. But I'm very, very interested in how people put themselves together, how women and men announce themselves to the world, through what they put on their bodies. Whether we choose Birkenstocks or whether we choose Burberry - it all signifies something and it's really interesting to me.

Pretending is a very valuable life skill.

Probably we should let Hillary [Clinton] play the role she was destined to play all by herself first.

Expensive clothes are a waste of money.

I like who I am now. Other people may not. I'm comfortable. I feel freer now. I don't want growing older to matter to me.

Well, it has to do with very deep things, because it might be that imagining yourself as a girl is a diminishment. But it is something that when I made "The Devil Wears Prada" it was the first time in my life, 30 years of making movies, that a man came up and said I know how you felt. I know how you felt. I have a job like that. People understand.

I would never say don't do acting [to my kids], because I think it is a glorious profession and I am so thankful for everything it has let me express.

I am not always happy. I am happy in front of the press. I can be extremely grumpy, ask my husband.

I don't really talk about my process very much, because I feel like if I give something away, it might not come back.

Obsession is an attractive thing. People who are really, really interested and good at one thing and smart are attractive, if they're men.

The career I chose was a drama major in college, at Yale, when I played a 90-year-old woman. One of my most celebrated roles. Then I played a really fat person. I played a lot of different things. That's how I thought I loved to wrangle my talent, my need to express myself. I like to do it that way.

Let's face it, we were all once three-year-olds who stood in the middle of the living room and everybody thought we were so adorable. Only some of us grow up and get paid for it.

I really think there's a difference between how men critics see things than how women tend to. And I don't want to make that - it's not a generality and I don't want to say that, but I just feel - I know I do the same thing. There are certain things that I just am not that interested in. Certain kinds of films - I just don't enter them.

The biggest lesson I learned in my career was to ask other people what they make because the men usually make more than you do. And it's good to know. You're not allowed to ask...but it's good to ask.

I never give any character I play less respect than I give my own life.

Having wrinkles is at once strange and exciting.

I want to feel my life while I'm in it.

The key to every actor is deep, deep insecurity.

I'm all over the place.

I separated myself in Prada because I didn't want to have fun. They were all having a lot of fun - Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci - and they were a little coterie of laughs.

I think it is typical for many men to have problems when their wives make more money then they do, or when their wives are higher on the corporate ladder than they find themselves. I think that often is an issue.

I do honestly think that if women were running the world there would be more investment in peace, because basically as women we do not want to see our children killed. Maybe I am completely idealistic, but until we see women in equal positions of power in the world, I just think that we are doomed.

I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me.

You just have to keep on doing what you do. It's the lesson I get from my husband; he just says, Keep going. Start by starting.

I'm curious about other people. That's the essence of my acting. I'm interested in what it would be like to be you.

Margaret Thatcher was a pioneer, willingly or unwillingly, for the role of women in politics.

Wrinkled, wrinkled little star... hope they never see the scars.

Enough people write about me every day without even interviewing me.

I'm thrilled when I get nominated. I don't count how many and I don't remember how many I've had. I just know it's a lot.

I feel much more comfortable dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. I'm wearing very fancy clothes today. It's Valentino. But the film ["Devil Wears Prada"] did not make me change my style. If anything, it has made me appreciate the people who do this every morning in a serious way, get dressed up and really put together that look. I mean, wow. It's amazing.

I love acting, of course, but being with my husband and my children always brought me the greatest joy and happiness in life.

Women are the last group anyone cares about in Hollywood.

We don't like to talk about that in America, but there are classes in America. And she [Julia Child] was of a class of women who were wealthy, privately educated, went to Smith, moved in that sort of circle. She was conscripted into the OSS, which is the early CIA, which was all filled with Yalies and Princeton and Harvard people and a few women who were typing mostly but also had something to do.

So it's not a thing that's a struggle. It's work, but it's not a struggle. It's fun. And she had a very particular way of emphasizing points and making her point, and that had to do with bringing out a word that you didn't normally think was the most important word in the sentence.

I love food and I love sex.

I do know that we have delusions about ourselves in what we sound like.

Personality is immediately apparent, from birth, and I don't think it really changes.

The reason I chose the movies that I did was based on where they were being filmed.

I had this sort of idolatry for certain actors who preceded me, people who inspired me, so I'm honored to be that way for young actors.

I say to myself, 'I don't know how to act - and why does anybody want to look at me on-screen anymore?' ... Lots of actors feel that way. What gives you strength is also your weakness - your raging insecurity.

My advice: Don't waste so much time worrying about your skin or your weight. Develop what you do, what you put your hands on in the world.

It is well that the earth is round that we do not see too far ahead.

I have a very busy life, and not many people who have a career and four kids go out a lot to the movies.

Yeah, I did need a lot of breath [to play Margaret Thatcher]. I needed much more breath than I have, after all of my expensive drama school training. I couldn't keep up with her.