Meryl Streep quotes:

Expensive clothes are a waste of money.

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.

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

The work will stand, no matter what.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

I need to go where people are serious about acting.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I have a lot of people to thank and I'm going to be one of those people that tries to mention a lot of names, because I know just two seconds ago my mother and father went completely berserk and I'd like to give some other mothers and fathers that same opportunity.

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

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

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

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

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.

Everyone tries to look a cookie-cutter kind of way, and actually the people who look different are the ones who get picked up.

Singing and acting are very similar. Singing makes you reach into your deepest feelings. Singing is an extension of everything that you do when you're acting.

I don't have a favorite director just like I don't have a favorite color or I don't have a favorite food. I like everything.

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.

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

You have to embrace getting older. Life is precious, and when you've lost a lot of people, you realize that each day is a gift.

Instant gratification is not soon enough.

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

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

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.

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.

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....

Guard your good mood.

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

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.

Pretending is a very valuable life skill.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

I own one pair of Prada shoes. They make my feet hurt... It's not the shoes' fault; they are exquisitely made. I blame my feet. I've got my mother's feet.

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.

If everybody that had two cars had a Prius instead of an SUV, we wouldn't be in the Middle East right now.

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

I do think sometimes when scrolling through the TV and there's something on and I look at it and I think oh, my god. I thought I was fat? What is my problem?

You can't get spoiled if you do your own ironing.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 you're low. We need each other in that way.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I think your self emerges more clearly over time.

~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.~

A man has always been seen as someone who works hard and has a full-time occupation. I think women should have the same opportunity and not have any stigma attached to them if they choose to pursue their careers.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

And she [Margaret Thatcher] also had a sort of a way, like a railroad train, of going, taking a breath and starting quite quietly and making a point in a way that you don't really know that this point is going to be made through several examples, and there will be not be a break in the speaking voice at any point.

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

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

Being an actor lets me be a million different things.

But for me, it [singing] was a way to get out the feeling of the song, and also to get out the feelings that, you know, roil in high school, to express something that I had no other way of expressing.

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

Every easy choice will have its consequence tomorrow.

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

Fear focuses the mind.

First I'm going to thank Don because when you thank your husband at the end of the speech they play him out with the music and I want him to know that everything I value most in our lives you've given me,

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

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

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.

Having wrinkles is at once strange and exciting.

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 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.

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

I can become you for a second and you can become me and this lifts us up.

I can't stand most things that I see.

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.

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

I don't have time to read a lot. And when I do, I read things that have just the facts.

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 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."

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.