Meryl Streep Quotes

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

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

Sometimes you look out the window and you look at all the windows, and think inside very single one of them is somebody with some huge, weird, terrible problem, some great jokes.

Having wrinkles is at once strange and exciting.

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.

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.

I own one pair of Prada shoes. They make my feet hurt ... It's not the shoes' fault; they are exquisitely made. I blame my feet. I've got my mother's feet.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

But for me, it [singing] was a way to get out the feeling of the song, and also to get out the feelings that, you know, roil in high school, to express something that I had no other way of expressing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I can't stand most things that I see.

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

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.

Enough people write about me every day without even interviewing 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.

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

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

I no longer have patience for certain things, not because I've become arrogant, but simply because I reached a point in my life where I do not want to waste more time with what displeases me or hurts me. I have no patience for cynicism, excessive criticism and demands of any nature. I lost the will to please those who do not like me, to love those who do not love me and to smile at those who do not want to smile at me. I no longer spend a single minute on those who lie or want to manipulate. I decided not to coexist anymore with pretense, hypocrisy, dishonesty and cheap praise. I do not tolerate selective erudition nor academic arrogance. I do not adjust either to popular gossiping. I hate conflict and comparisons. I believe in a world of opposites and that's why I avoid people with rigid and inflexible personalities. In friendship I dislike the lack of loyalty and betrayal. I do not get along with those who do not know how to give a compliment or a word of encouragement. Exaggerations bore me and I have difficulty accepting those who do not like animals. And on top of everything I have no patience for anyone who does not deserve my patience.

One must be brave if one is to take the wheel.

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

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

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.

Most of the great practitioners of the art of acting know exactly what they're doing; even in the best, most successful moments, when they let go of the awareness of what they are doing, they still, somewhere deep inside their body, know what they're doing. There is a craft.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Women are the last group anyone cares about in Hollywood.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

When you're an actor and there's no music, you have to sort of bring it all yourself.

I never look a gift horse in the mouth. And I've been really, really lucky. My career has been given to me by the people I've worked with. 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.

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?

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.

The more you are in this business, the more humbled by it you become.

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.

I didn't have any confidence in my beauty when I was young. I felt like a character actress, and I still do.

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

Every easy choice will have its consequence tomorrow.

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.

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.

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.

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy, we can all sense a mysterious connection to each other.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The fairy tale that really scared me was Bluebeard. That's the one where he just kills one after another of these woman, these wives, that he lures up to the castle. I just think about fairy tales as stories women told their children to warn them? To keep them safe, to make sure they married up, all the things that would have safeguarded them in the olden days.

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.

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

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

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.

I found it unbearable when I allow the song to meet the music, to allow the story to meet the music.

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

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

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

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

Guard your good mood.

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

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.

The movie that makes me cry is Anchorman. I have the biggest
crush on Will Ferrel I love him in every film he does. I mean, Ryan Gosling could be my child. I'm not going to have a crush on a child.
Will Ferrell is a man.

Fear focuses the mind.

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.

I think 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.

The quote above about patience is NOT MERYL STREEP's-- this quote is actually from the pen of Portuguese self-help author/life coach José Micard Teixeira. PLEASE REMOVE IT!!!!!

I feel much more comfortable dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. "Devil Wears Prada" did not make me change my style. But 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.

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.

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

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

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?

If you raise children, you forget what age they are. I mean you don't literally forget, but you treat a 13-year-old like she's 10 and there's a big difference in those three years and they can't stand it. They want to be treated like they're 17 when they're 13. And sometimes you can't help thinking of them as if they were 10 or 10 months old because it's all so recent. So we do overprotect sometimes.

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.

They were showing clips from my earlier films. All I could see was this beautiful young woman who was anxious about whether she was too heavy or if her nose was too big. I felt like saying to her, 'Just relax and it will all be OK.

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

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

Pretending is a very valuable life skill.

There are some days when I, myself , think I'm overrated

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.