Meryl Streep Quotations | Page 3

~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.~

Some men can maintain cragginess and weary masculinity. Women just get old.

I found it unbearable when I allow the song to meet the music, to allow the story to meet the music.

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

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

Being an actor lets me be a million different things.

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.

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

To imagine myself in different ways comes from my beginnings in the theatre. People are more accepting when you go 'apparently', 'wildly' afield from who you are or where you were brought up.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Yeah, I did need a lot of breath [to play Margaret Thatcher]. I needed much more breath than I have, after all of my expensive drama school training. I couldn't keep up with her.

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.

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.

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.

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

What led me to that was I have never - I mean, I watch movies and I don't care who is the protagonist. I feel what that guy is feeling. You know, if it's Tom Cruise leaping over a building - I want to make it, you know? And I'm going to - yes, I made it. And yeah, so I get that.

I've been making a lot of pasta. It's easy. There are unusual tastes that you can combine. I cook because my kids like a certain kind of thing and then they want it over and over.

Expensive clothes are a waste of money.

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

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.

The work will stand, no matter what.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

Some people hold themselves above the fashion business but are still complicit and fall prey to it.

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

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

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

It is interesting how fashion filters down and we discover in the "Devil Wears Prada" that we're all prey to trends, even if we think we are not.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thank God I couldn't see anything out there.

This creation is not really like his show. It is an imagined last show, and so it's in the context of being taken over by a radio conglomerate, which is happening to a lot of radio shows at home.

They obviously feel that, to emerge from the pack, they need to distinguish themselves by being more willing to do that than anyone else. It's not about the roles they aspire to -- it's that they have to sexualize themselves.

(They are) improbable things suspended in space, like the earth.

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.

Hillary Clinton is so smart... People reserve a special venom for her.

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."

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.

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 love food and I love sex.

The biggest lesson I learned in my career was to ask other people what they make because the men usually make more than you do. And it's good to know. You're not allowed to ask...but it's good to ask.