Top 100 Meryl Streep Quotes
#1. Having wrinkles is at once strange and exciting.
Meryl Streep
#2. I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs. Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me.
Meryl Streep
#3. Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials.
Meryl Streep
#4. I can become you for a second and you can become me and this lifts us up.
Meryl Streep
#5. People want what they want. Sometimes you just have to walk in defiance of it and just be yourself.
Meryl Streep
#6. What makes you different or weird, that's your strength.
Meryl Streep
#7. Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.
Meryl Streep
#8. The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy, we can all sense a mysterious connection to each other.
Meryl Streep
#9. 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.
Meryl Streep
#10. I get a trickling few scripts that I'm lucky enough that some of them are great. I don't get loads of scripts.
Meryl Streep
#11. Having been let out of the barn once, I know I wouldn't be happy if I were home all the time.
Meryl Streep
#12. How you first meet the public is how the industry sees you. You can't argue with them. That's their perception.
Meryl Streep
#13. 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.
Meryl Streep
#14. I don't have time to read a lot. And when I do, I read things that have just the facts.
Meryl Streep
#15. I have four to five months, tops, per year to give to my acting work.
Meryl Streep
#16. 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.
Meryl Streep
#17. 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.
Meryl Streep
#18. I have a very good life - I'm lucky enough not to be deprived.
Meryl Streep
#19. 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?
Meryl Streep
#21. 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.
Meryl Streep
#22. 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.
Meryl Streep
#23. 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.
Meryl Streep
#24. There are wonderfully talented actresses. It's a really rich field. There isn't as rich a field of material.
Meryl Streep
#25. The greatest gift given to man by God - is the ability to empathize.
Meryl Streep
#26. The first thing [in career and motherhood] is a great husband. That I found many years ago and I am lucky in that way.
Meryl Streep
#28. You win an Oscar, it can double the audience that you had before.
Meryl Streep
#29. I love acting, of course, but being with my husband and my children always brought me the greatest joy and happiness in life.
Meryl Streep
#30. I have a theory that movies operate on the level of dreams, where you dream yourself.
Meryl Streep
#31. 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.
Meryl Streep
#32. She [ Anne Hathaway] is just a delicious talent. I think she can delight us for years and years in lots and lots of different things.Her own personality is so appealing and fresh and open and warm. I think she can have a unique career.
Meryl Streep
#33. I never give any character I play less respect than I give my own life.
Meryl Streep
#34. 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.
Meryl Streep
#35. For me, clothes are kind of a character. They're more interesting in those terms.
Meryl Streep
#36. 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.
Meryl Streep
#37. 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.
Meryl Streep
#38. 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.
Meryl Streep
#39. The interesting thing about being a mother is that everyone wants pets, but no one but me cleans the kitty litter.
Meryl Streep
#40. I feel like I run a business although I haven't one. It's planning, planning, and planning.
Meryl Streep
#41. 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.
Meryl Streep
#42. 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.
Meryl Streep
#43. I think the best role models for women are people who are fruitfully and confidently themselves, who bring light into the world.
Meryl Streep
#44. The key to every actor is deep, deep insecurity.
Meryl Streep
#45. I have always regarded myself as the pillar of my life.
Meryl Streep
#46. I think your self emerges more clearly over time.
Meryl Streep
#47. 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.
Meryl Streep
#48. People say, When you have children, everything changes. But maybe things are awakened that were already there.
Meryl Streep
#49. I don't really talk about my process very much, because I feel like if I give something away, it might not come back.
Meryl Streep
#50. That's my way in the very beginning - how to enter it [a role]. Very quickly in the process, I don't think about voice being separate from the way you hold your head or the way you sit or the way you put on lipstick. It's all a piece of a person, and it's all driven by conviction.
Meryl Streep
#51. Everyone tries to look a cookie-cutter kind of way, and actually the people who look different are the ones who get picked up.
Meryl Streep
#52. 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.
Meryl Streep
#53. 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.
Meryl Streep
#54. I follow no doctrine. I don't belong to a church or a temple or a synagogue or an ashram.
Meryl Streep
#55. 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.
Meryl Streep
#56. 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.
Meryl Streep
#57. I feel very strongly that we make decisions about what we're giving to the world, what we're withholding from the world, by virtue of what we put on our bodies.
Meryl Streep
#58. 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.
Meryl Streep
#59. 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.
Meryl Streep
#60. When criticism comes your way as an actor they are not criticizing your writing or your painting or your piece, they are criticizing you! It is hard to put that away in a place where you are not hurt.
Meryl Streep
#61. 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.
Meryl Streep
#62. I wonder which of the megaton bombs Jesus, our
President's personal savior, would have personally
dropped on the sleeping families of Baghdad?
Meryl Streep
#63. There's no road map on how to raise a family: it's always an enormous negotiation.
Meryl Streep
#64. Margaret Thatcher was a pioneer, willingly or unwillingly, for the role of women in politics,
Meryl Streep
#65. 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.
Meryl Streep
#66. 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.
Meryl Streep
#67. Sometimes with my children, I remember exactly how I felt as the child in this situation, not just how it feels to be me.
Meryl Streep
#69. 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.
Meryl Streep
#70. What's worse than brutality that dehumanizes women? Tolerance and indifference towards it.
Meryl Streep
#71. There are improbable things suspended in space, like the earth.
Meryl Streep
#73. 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.
Meryl Streep
#74. Chris Cooper is one of my favorite actors in the world. I've seen him in most everything he's done.
Meryl Streep
#75. 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.
Meryl Streep
#76. The thing that you have to fight the most when you lose is you feel like the biggest failure in the world.
Meryl Streep
#77. True freedom is understanding that we have a choice in who and what we allow to have power over us.
Meryl Streep
#79. Wrinkled, wrinkled little star ... hope they never see the scars.
Meryl Streep
#80. My feeling about fears is, if you voice your fears, they may come true. I'm superstitious enough to believe that.
Meryl Streep
#81. Acting is my way of investigating human nature and having fun at the same time
Meryl Streep
#82. 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.
Meryl Streep
#83. 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.
Meryl Streep
#84. I believe in a world of opposites and that's why I avoid people with rigid and inflexible personalities.
Meryl Streep
#85. 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.
Meryl Streep
#86. When I was younger I spent way too much time thinking about me being too fat. So stupid.
Meryl Streep
#87. 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.
Meryl Streep
#88. Everyone is interesting. Everyone has something unexpected to offer and the job of acting is to pull it out of each other.
Meryl Streep
#89. The progression of roles you take strings together a portrait of an actor, but it's a completely random process.
Meryl Streep
#90. Show business has been really, really good to me because I can work and take a lot of time off, and I'm extremely undisciplined person.
Meryl Streep
#91. 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.
Meryl Streep
#93. I don't like to be gone all weekend and at night too. Because for 20 years, I've had children who are in school.
Meryl Streep
#94. If you make the tough decisions, people will hate you today. But they will thank you for generations.
Meryl Streep
#95. I really worked very hard to bring my voice back because I used to have a good voice, and to try to do my exercises that I remember from Yale and all the things in the olden days, clearing your sinuses and all that.
Meryl Streep
#96. 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.
Meryl Streep
#97. 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.
Meryl Streep
#98. You can't sing when you're upset. You can't sing when you're crying. You get all congested and disgusting.
Meryl Streep
#99. 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.
Meryl Streep
#100. I found it unbearable when I allow the song to meet the music, to allow the story to meet the music.
Meryl Streep
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