Top 297 Quotes & Sayings by Meryl Streep - Page 2

I remember, as I was hovering around 40, I thought each movie would be my last, really.

Nobody can swashbuckle a quick-witted riposte like Emma Thompson. She's a writer, a real writer, and she has a relish for the well-chosen word.

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

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

I'm really interested in the collaborative thing. It's what makes it scary because you never know what it's going to end up like. But you hope. You put yourself in the hands of the best people you can find, and you're completely dependent on the kindness of strangers and their commitment. It's like this mutual delusion.

Disney, who brought joy, arguably, to billions of people, was, perhaps, or had some... racist proclivities. He formed and supported an anti-Semitic industry lobby. And he was certainly, on the evidence of his company's policies, a gender bigot.

I think I'm not a natural performer; I think I'm an actor.

I think we all think we sound really good in the shower, where there's that nice reverb, and the water's drowning you out, and there is some liberation in the freedom of being totally alone and really going for it.

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

I didn't really like opera. I liked cheerleading and boys and, later, smoking. So my opera career was cut short when I was 15. My dad got sick, and we couldn't afford the lessons, so I stopped and became a cheerleader and wrecked my voice.

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

Men should look at the world as if something is wrong when their voices predominate. They should feel it.

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

I was offered, within one year, three different witch roles. It was almost like the world was saying - or the studios were saying - 'We don't know what to do with you.'

Hillary Clinton has taken some fire over 40 years of her fight for families and children. How does she do it? That's what I want to know. Where does she get her grit and her grace? Where do any of our female firsts, our pathbreakers, where do they find that strength?

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.

I need to go where people are serious about acting.

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

It's amazing how easily people are led to fury and chaos. Unhappy people with guns are not going to make this country great.

I can't do a lot of things, like golf. I don't like golf. I mean, I really don't, because I tend to like things that I can do right away. If I can't do it right away, I don't like it.

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

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

Leave me to the thing I love. I love acting. But being called 'the greatest living actress' - a designation not even my mother would sanction - is the opposite of good or valuable or useful. It is a curse for a working actor.

People at agencies and studios, including the parent boards, might look around the table at the decision-making level and feel something is wrong if half their participants are not women. Because our tastes are different, what we value is different. Not better, different.

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

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.

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

I think you have to listen to the people who are deeply unhappy. You have to find the source of it and not overreact to the craziness in it.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

I know movies are a function of our dream world. And when you project yourself on screen, it's easier to project yourself into what you were, not what you are.

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.

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.

I have a very clear understanding of what my voice is. It's like a B voice. It hovers around B-minus, B-plus. I have great friends who are wonderful singers, and I know I'll never be able to do that. But singing through a character is something I can do.

Fear focuses the mind.

Pretending is a very valuable life skill.

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

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

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.

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

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.

We are the choices we have made.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every easy choice will have its consequence tomorrow.

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.