Quotes by Meryl Streep

• 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.
• Obsession is an attractive thing. People who are really, really interested and good at one thing and smart are attractive, if they're men.
• My job is usually to express emotion as freely as possible.
• My feeling about fears is, if you voice your fears, they may come true. I'm superstitious enough to believe that.
• My family really does come first. It always did and always will.
• Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials.
• People say, When you have children, everything changes. But maybe things are awakened that were already there.
• It's bizarre that the produce manager is more important to my children's health than the pediatrician.
• It is well that the earth is round that we do not see too far ahead.
• Interestingly, young people don't come to you for advice. Especially the ones who are related to you.
• 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.
• Personality is immediately apparent, from birth, and I don't think it really changes.
• If I am not confident that I can portray the character perfectly on screen, I won't even try.
• The reason I chose the movies that I did was based on where they were being filmed.
• I'm older. There's some sort of seniority. As a matter of fact, the seniority ebbs as you get older.
• Instant gratification is not soon enough.
• The work is the most fun; it seems illicit how much fun it is.
• You win an Oscar, it can double the audience that you had before.
• 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.
• You can't get spoiled if you do your own ironing.
• 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.
• There's no road map on how to raise a family: it's always an enormous negotiation.
• The more you are in this business, the more humbled by it you become.
• The work will stand, no matter what.
• 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 progression of roles you take strings together a portrait of an actor, but it's a completely random process.
• I'm never so sure as I was in my mid-20s.
• The interesting thing about being a mother is that everyone wants pets, but no one but me cleans the kitty litter.
• The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.
• Sometimes with my children, I remember exactly how I felt as the child in this situation, not just how it feels to be me.
• 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.
• There are wonderfully talented actresses. It's a really rich field. There isn't as rich a field of material.
• Every single decision I make about what material I do, what I'm putting out in the world, is because of my children.
• I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs. Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me.
• 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.
• How you first meet the public is how the industry sees you. You can't argue with them. That's their perception.
• Having been let out of the barn once, I know I wouldn't be happy if I were home all the time.
• For me, clothes are kind of character; I don't follow fashion or understand trends.
• I can't stand most things that I see.
• 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.
• Chris Cooper is one of my favorite actors in the world. I've seen him in most everything he's done.
• Enough people write about me every day without even interviewing me.
• America doesn't reward people of my age, either in day-to-day life or for their performances.
• All an actor has is their blind faith that they are who they say they are today, in any scene.
• Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.
• 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.
• There are improbable things suspended in space, like the earth.
• Expensive clothes are a waste of money.
• I have four to five months, tops, per year to give to my acting work.
• All that attention to the perfect lighting, the perfect this, the perfect that, I find terribly annoying.
• I want to feel my life while I'm in it.
• I think your self emerges more clearly over time.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• I need to go where people are serious about acting.
• I have a very good life - I'm lucky enough not to be deprived.
• I have a very busy life, and not many people who have a career and four kids go out a lot to the movies.
• 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 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 get a trickling few scripts that I'm lucky enough that some of them are great. I don't get loads of scripts.
• 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 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 didn't have any confidence in my beauty when I was young. I felt like a character actress, and I still do.
• I'm all over the place.
• Don't change to fit the fashion, Change the fashion to fit you!
• The only way to deal with horror is to laugh in its face.
• I never made a mistake in my life. I thought I did once, but I was wrong.
• Success is just failure discovered at cocktail hour.