Meryl Streep Quotes

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


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

3. 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.

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

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

6. 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.

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

8. I couldn't care less about fashion. If I had taken any clothes home, they would have remained in my closet for the rest of their existence.

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

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

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



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

13. I need to go where people are serious about acting.

14. Expensive clothes are a waste of money.




15. If I am not confident that I can portray the character perfectly on screen, I won't even try.

16. 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.

17. Every single decision I make about what material I do, what I'm putting out in the world, is because of my children.

18. 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.

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

20. 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.





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

22. Instant gratification is not soon enough.


23. I try to lead as ordinary a life as I can. You can't get spoiled if you do your own ironing.


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

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

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




27. I can't stand most things that I see.

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

29. 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.





30. 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.

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


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


33. People say: "When you have children, everything changes". But maybe things are awakened that were already there.

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

35. 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.





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

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


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

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

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

41. Having been let out of the barn once, I know I wouldn't be happy if I were home all the time.






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

43. 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.



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

45. I have a holistic need to work and to have huge ties of love in my life. I can't imagine eschewing one for the other.


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

47. 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.

48. I think your self emerges more clearly over time.

49. I'm all over the place.




50. 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.

51. I'm never so sure as I was in my mid-20s.

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






53. 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.

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







55. My feeling about fears is, if you voice your fears, they may come true. I'm superstitious enough to believe that.

56. 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.

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


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

59. The work is the most fun; it seems illicit how much fun it is.

60. The work will stand, no matter what.

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



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

63. We are who we're going to be when we're very old, and when we're very old we are who we were when we were 8.

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



65. You win an Oscar, it can double the audience that you had before.

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

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






68. 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.

69. 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.

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







71. (Entertainment Tonight 1981) I had it (smoking), it stinks.

72. I'm looking forward to bigger parts in the future, but I'm not doing soft-core scripts where the character emerges in half-light, half-dressed.

73. (on whether Madonna should play Eva Peron in the film version of Evita 1996 instead of her): I can sing better than she can. If Madonna gets it, I'll rip her throat out!

74. (on her view of acting back in college) I thought it was really fun, you've got to understand, but I didn't think it was a serious way to conduct your life. You know, I had a sense of mission. I was a true child of the '60s.

75. I love doing comedy, but people just don't give me enough of a chance. It's one of the reasons I enjoy "The Manchurian Candidate" (2004) so much. It's because I actually get a chance to be funny.

76. Let's face it, we were all once 3-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.






77. Someone once said that sometimes studio heads don't want to cast films with the image of their first wife in the role. It's just rather unpleasant for them. So they like the idea of the new one.

78. I think I was wired for family. You know how they say people are wired for religion, or wired for this or that? I always knew I would like to, if I could find the right person, have a family. I can't imagine living single.



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

80. (on winning the 1983 Best Actress Oscar for "Sophie's Choice" 1982) Oh boy, no matter how much you try to imagine what this is like, it's just so incredibly thrilling right down your toes.

81. But…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.

82. Sometimes under-preparation is very good, because it instills fear and fear is galvanizing. It makes you break out of yourself. If you're prepared, then you think you're ready, and if you think you're ready, then you're not ready.

83. (on her struggles as an actress earlier in her career) It's hard to negotiate the present landscape with a brain and a female body.





84. (on winning a Golden Globe for "Adaptation" 2002) My God, I was settling in for a long winter's nap. I've been nominated, like 789 times, but it hasn't been since the "Mesozoic Era" that I've actually won. 

85. It would be nice to have a woman President. I think half the Senate should be women, half of Parliament, half the ruling mullahs. But that will never happen, darling!

86. (on Dustin Hoffman) He's energized and the greatest combination of the generous and the selfish that ever lived. He wants to be the greatest actor who ever was.

87. (on her husband) I don't know what I'd do without my husband. I'd be dead, emotionally at least, if I hadn't met him. He's the greatest.


88. (on life as a young actress) When I was 20 I busked to afford accommodation. One night I hadn't earned enough, I actually slept in the open in Green Park (in London). The view was of the Ritz Hotel and I vowed I'd stay there one day. And I have.

89. (on her Lifetime Achievement Award from the AFI) I don't want to spit in the eye of good fortune, but it was weird. I felt like I'd butted in line in front of Lucille Ball, Audrey Hepburn, Katharine Hepburn. Hello? How did this happen? I was only the sixth woman to receive it, but they found 26 men to give it to. I thought that was embarrassing.

90. (accepting the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical 2007) I think I've worked with everyone in the room! I have!





91. It's a lesson I learned in drama school: the teacher asks: "How do you be the queen?" And everybody says: "Oh it's about posture and authority." And they said: "no, it's about how the air in the room shifts when you walk in. And that's everyone else's work".

92. I really, really depend on the other actors for the confirmation of who I think I am. And so it's important to me to work with good people that are not worried about how they look. You know. Real actors. They're your blood.




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

94. I mean, come on; when you have people writing these things, that you're the greatest thing that ever ate scenery, you're dead. You're f... dead. How can you even presume to begin a new character? It's a killer.

95. (on her role in "The Manchurian Candidate" 2004) I loved being someone so certain. Because certainty is just so attractive in people. To me, it's a completely bogus position - for me. Because, you know, I'm listening to every side. But it's so nice not to have to listen to all the different sides. To be so clear and on your track and sure. It's a fabulous thing. Unfortunately, it leads to fanaticism. 

96. (part of Emmy acceptance speech for "Angels in America" 2003) Glenn (Close) is my friend so I know she'll forgive me, Helen Mirren is an acting god, and no one has put a better performance on film than Judy Davis in "The Judy Garland Story". The only one in the group is Emma Thompson, who will hold a grudge for the rest of her life. But who cares?



97. (when accepting Emmy for "Angels in America" 2003) There are some days when even I think I'm overrated, but not today.


What do you think of Meryl Streep's quotes?



Feel free to comment and share this blog post if you find it interesting!