Meryl streep quotes

Expensive clothes are a waste of money.

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.

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.

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.

You have to embrace getting older.

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.

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.

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

I need to go where people are serious about acting.

We are the choices we have made.

I can't stand most things that I see.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The key to every actor is deep, deep insecurity.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Guard your good mood.

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.

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

Fear focuses the mind.

Acting is my way of investigating human nature and having fun at the same time

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I think your self emerges more clearly over time.

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

Every easy choice will have its consequence tomorrow.

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

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.

The work will stand, no matter what.

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

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 all make the mistake thinking that how you look makes you more worthy of love.

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.

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

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

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 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."

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

Being an actor lets me be a million different things.

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

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

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.

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.

Enough people write about me every day without even interviewing 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.

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

Acting has to reach everybody on some level - it's a communication of feeling - but as far as judging the work is concerned, it is, I think, something that actors know about.

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

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 once read that in any good marriage, one partner is the gardener and the other is the garden. We take it in turns to be either.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Pretending is a very valuable life skill.

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.

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.

I'm all over the place.

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.

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.

Instant gratification is not soon enough.

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

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.

Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.

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

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.