Meryl Streep

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 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.

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

You win an Oscar, it can double the audience that you had before.

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

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

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

I think your self emerges more clearly over time.

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

I have a very good life – I’m lucky enough not to be deprived.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Sometimes with my children, I remember exactly how I felt as the child in this situation, not just how it feels to be me.

I want to feel my life while I’m in it.

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

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.

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.

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

I need to go where people are serious about acting.

I’m never so sure as I was in my mid-20s.

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

The work is the most fun; it seems illicit how much fun it is.

The reason I chose the movies that I did was based on where they were being filmed.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Instant gratification is not soon enough.

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

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.

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

I’m all over the place.

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

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

I can’t stand most things that I see.

Expensive clothes are a waste of money.

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

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

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

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

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

The more you are in this business, the more humbled by it you become.

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