Top 297 Quotes & Sayings by Meryl Streep - Page 3

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.

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

Guard your good mood.

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

The key to every actor is deep, deep insecurity.

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

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.

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.

Being an actor lets me be a million different things.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

You have to embrace getting older.

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 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."

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.