Meryl Streep Quotes

Sometimes with my children, I remember exactly how I felt as the child in this situation, not just how it feels to be me.

Some people hold themselves above the fashion business but are still complicit and fall prey to it.

So yeah, when I was a kid, when I was 16, 17, I'd come home from high school, and my dad collected all of Barbra Streisand's records. And she was very young then. I think she probably had three records out, and she was 21, and we had them all. And I knew every single song, every breath, every elision, every swell. And I sang along to it.

If you make the tough decisions, people will hate you today. But they will thank you for generations.

All an actor has, I think, is their heart, really,...that's the place you go for your inspiration. If my heart wasn't filled with them, where would I get stuff? What would I have to express?

I don't know why I don't watch a lot of movies; I can barely keep up with the things my friends are in. There isn't enough time in life.

There's no road map on how to raise a family: it's always an enormous negotiation.

America doesn't reward people of my age, either in day-to-day life or for their performances.

This is your time and it feels normal to you, but really, there is no normal. There's only change and resistance to it and then more change.

There is some liberation in the freedom of being totally alone and really going for it.

You have to embrace getting older. Life is precious, and when you've lost a lot of people, you realize each day is a gift.

The best thing about acting is when you're playing a scene and you actually become your character and lose yourself in that moment. That's when you know you've been succeeded at what you've worked very hard to accomplish in your profession. Those are the truly thrilling moments.

Guard your good mood.

Singing and acting are very similar. Singing makes you reach into your deepest feelings. Singing is an extension of everything that you do when you're acting.

Young people who learn the arts do better in every phase of their lives.

All an actor has is their blind faith that they are who they say they are today, in any scene.

You're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but Earl Blackwell finally died, and I was on his blacklist every year for being the worst dressed person.

Listening is everything. Listening is the whole deal. That's what I think. And I mean that in terms of before you work, after you work, in between work, with your children, with your husband, with your friends, with your mother, with your father. It's everything. And it's where you learn everything.

In my own experience of male and female directors, people have a much, much harder time taking a direct command from a woman. It's somehow very difficult for people.

I get a trickling few scripts that I'm lucky enough that some of them are great. I don't get loads of scripts.

Anyone who wants to achieve something, needs a lot of work.

I have four to five months, tops!, per year to give to my acting work.

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.

While I am overwhelmingly proud of work that I, believe me, did not do on my own, I can assure you that awards have very little bearing on my own personal happiness, my own sense of well-being and purpose in the world.

I have a lot of people to thank and I'm going to be one of those people that tries to mention a lot of names, because I know just two seconds ago my mother and father went completely berserk and I'd like to give some other mothers and fathers that same opportunity.

It's hard to negotiate the present landscape with a brain and a female body.

I have a theory that movies operate on the level of dreams, where you dream yourself.

I think that you find your own way. You have your own rules. You have your own understanding of yourself, and that's what you're going to count on. In the end, it's what feels right to you. Not what your mother told you. Not what some actress told you. Not what anybody else told you but the still, small voice.

No one has ever asked an actor, 'You're playing a strong-minded man.' We assume that men are strong-minded, or have opinions. But a strong-minded woman is a different animal.

Everything that truly makes us happy is quite simple - love, sex and food!

I had a number of great teachers and the ones that really were the strongest influences on me were women. They were really, really smart and interesting women.

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.

There are improbable things suspended in space, like the earth.

When they called my name, I had this feeling I could hear half of America going, 'Oh no. Come on... Her, again?' You know. But, whatever.

I believe in a world of opposites and that’s why I avoid people with rigid and inflexible personalities.

Interestingly, young people don't come to you for advice. Especially the ones who are related to you.

People have to make their own decisions about their lives.

I'm in show business. I believe in illusion and delusions and in holding aloft the bubble of a dream of some sort because, really, there are lots of reasons to look at the chasm. But art and music, these ineffables, they're just - they're the consolations of what human beings can create and make, and delight is accessible, you know, should you care to find it.

We need art as much as we need good works. You need it like food. You need it for inspiration to keep going on the days that your low. We need each other in that way.

Jumpsuits for men are always so difficult when you get to that one area.

It's harder for men to imagine themselves as the girl in the movies than it is for me to imagine myself as Daniel Craig bringing down the building.

I don't think we can say that all working women will get divorced - it's so dangerous to make these things emblematic of anything - but having said that, every person who has a big, important job and tries to have a family, has to make decisions every single minute.

It's bizarre that the produce manager is more important to my children's health than the pediatrician.

I don't know what my image is. I went to France to publicize Marvin's Room, and one really smart young woman journalist said to me, "You know, when I told people I was going to interview Meryl Streep they were so excited... all ze women in my office, they love you so much. But ze men - they are afraid of you."

This act of empathy, that women go through from the time we're little girls - we read all of literature, all of history, it's really about boys, most of it. But I can feel more like Peter Pan than Tinker Bell, or like Wendy. I wanted to be Tom Sawyer, not Becky. And we're so used to that act of empathizing with the protagonist of a male-driven plot. I mean, that's what we've done all our lives. You read history, you read great literature, Shakespeare, it's all fellas, you know?

I just take every day is a miracle and I'm really glad that I'm still working and that people are not sick of me, even though even I'm sick of me a little bit.

A man has always been seen as someone who works hard and has a full-time occupation. I think women should have the same opportunity and not have any stigma attached to them if they choose to pursue their careers.

There are wonderfully talented actresses. It's a really rich field. There isn't as rich a field of material.