Top 297 Quotes & Sayings by Meryl Streep - Page 4

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.

My mother was someone that walked into a room and lit it up. She made friends easily and she communicated her enthusiasms with great joy. I always wanted to be more like my mother than I am. I loved and admired her very deeply.

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.

I think we all think we sound really good in the shower, where there's that nice reverb.

On every film, the clothes are half the battle in creating the character. I have a great deal of opinion about how my people are presented. We show a great deal by what we put on our bodies.

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

How do I do that preparation [for film]? Just an immersion. I have a musician's, I guess, ear for the sound of the voice but it's also important to me, in the case of [playing] someone who is controversial, to get the outlines of the character right because how they present themselves to the world has a great deal to do with how people feel about them.

I never look a gift horse in the mouth. And I've been really, really lucky. I'm aware of that. And my career has been given to me by the people I've worked with, no question. 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.

I follow no doctrine. I don't belong to a church or a temple or a synagogue or an ashram.

I thought, "Why? and how did we evolve with this weak, and useless passion in tact within the deep heart's core?" And the answer as I've formulated it to myself is that empathy is the engine that powers all the best in us.

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

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.

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.

I've grown up well, partly because there weren't great girls' literature - Nancy Drew, maybe - but there weren't things. So there was Huck Finn and "Spin And Marty." The boys characters were interesting and you lived through them when you're watching it.

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

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.

When I was younger I spent way too much time thinking about me being too fat. So stupid.

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 am not always happy. I am happy in front of the press. I can be extremely grumpy, ask my husband.

If you have been touched by the success fairy, people think you know why. People think success breeds enlightenment and you are duty-bound to spread around like manure. Fertilize those young minds!

The first thing [in career and motherhood] is a great husband. That I found many years ago and I am lucky in that way.

I do know that we have delusions about ourselves in what we sound like.

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.

I don't really talk about my process very much, because I feel like if I give something away, it might not come back.

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.

You know, you're not aware of it, but you're following the action of the film through the body of the protagonist, you know? You feel what he feels when he jumps, when he leaps, when he wins, when he loses. And I think I just took it for granted that, you know, we can all do that, but it became obvious to me that men don't live through the female characters.

I don't have very much interest in trends and fashions. I don't follow the fashion shows and stuff like that into my real life. But I'm very, very interested in how people put themselves together, how women and men announce themselves to the world, through what they put on their bodies. Whether we choose Birkenstocks or whether we choose Burberry - it all signifies something and it's really interesting to me.

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.

Sometimes it's easier for people who are in authority to be authoritarian, because people know where you stand.

Take your heart to work and ask the most and best of everybody.

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.

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.

Probably we should let Hillary [Clinton] play the role she was destined to play all by herself first.

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.

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.

We change who we are to fit the exogenous of our time, and not just strategically or to our own advantage, sometimes sympathetically without our even knowing it for the betterment of the whole group.

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 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.

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 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.

I didn't go to Catholic school but I had a tough teacher, a tough math teacher.I remember everything that guy taught me. I really do.

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.

You can be afraid in a press conference, nervous, sweaty, but you can't be afraid when you do your work because it doesn't work that way.

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.

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.

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

People have to make their own decisions about their lives.

Women are the last group anyone cares about in Hollywood.

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.

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.

I would say, don't smoke. I'm kidding, but yeah, I did smoke in college and as a young actor and it's stupid.

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.

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.

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.

The idea that people do very bad things for sometimes very good reasons, feels reasons.

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.

Margaret Thatcher was a pioneer, willingly or unwillingly, for the role of women in politics.

Well, I got better after this, and my entire family really did appreciate it. Usually, they're resentful of movies that I go off and make, but this one had a bonus attached. But yeah, she had no breath.

It's hard to negotiate the present landscape with a brain and a female body.

My daughters had helped me to stop worrying about my appearance over the years. I wasted so many years thinking I wasn't pretty enough and why didn't I have Jessica Lange's body or someone else's legs? What a waste of time.