Meryl Streep quotes
Born
June 22, 1949, Summit, New Jersey, U.S.
Occupation
Actress.
Meryl Streep is an American actress.
You can’t suppress the things that make us human. It’s pointless to try.
– Meryl Streep
There’s no road map on how to raise a family: it’s always an enormous negotiation.
– Meryl Streep
The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.
– Meryl Streep
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.
– Meryl Streep
The more you are in this business, the more humbled by it you become.
– Meryl Streep
Instant gratification is not soon enough.
– Meryl Streep
I want to feel my life while I’m in it.
– Meryl Streep
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.
– Meryl Streep
My family really does come first. It always did and always will.
– Meryl Streep
Chris Cooper is one of my favorite actors in the world. I’ve seen him in most everything he’s done.
– Meryl Streep
Having been let out of the barn once, I know I wouldn’t be happy if I were home all the time.
– Meryl Streep
You can’t get spoiled if you do your own ironing.
– Meryl Streep
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.
– Meryl Streep
You win an Oscar, it can double the audience that you had before.
– Meryl Streep
I’m all over the place.
– Meryl Streep
I let the actions of my life stand for what I am as a human being. Contend with that, not the words.
– Meryl Streep
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.
– Meryl Streep
I have a very good life – I’m lucky enough not to be deprived.
– Meryl Streep
I think we all think we sound really good in the shower, where there’s that nice reverb, and the water’s drowning you out, and there is some liberation in the freedom of being totally alone and really going for it.
– Meryl Streep
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.
– Meryl Streep
I am a humanist. I am for nice, easy balance.
– Meryl Streep
Sometimes with my children, I remember exactly how I felt as the child in this situation, not just how it feels to be me.
– Meryl Streep
There are wonderfully talented actresses. It’s a really rich field. There isn’t as rich a field of material.
– Meryl Streep
Interestingly, young people don’t come to you for advice. Especially the ones who are related to you.
– Meryl Streep
I have a pretty good idea of what I am not good at and have it front and centre of my consciousness every minute I am doing it.
– Meryl Streep
I think your self emerges more clearly over time.
– Meryl Streep
Leave me to the thing I love. I love acting. But being called ‘the greatest living actress’ – a designation not even my mother would sanction – is the opposite of good or valuable or useful. It is a curse for a working actor.
– Meryl Streep
I’m older. There’s some sort of seniority. As a matter of fact, the seniority ebbs as you get older.
– Meryl Streep
The progression of roles you take strings together a portrait of an actor, but it’s a completely random process.
– Meryl Streep
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.
– Meryl Streep
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.
– Meryl Streep
I go to a lot of movies where people are all around me laughing, and I feel like I’m from outer space because I find it dangerous and stupid and horrible and degrading to women and all these things.
– Meryl Streep
If I am not confident that I can portray the character perfectly on screen, I won’t even try.
– Meryl Streep
I didn’t have any confidence in my beauty when I was young. I felt like a character actress, and I still do.
– Meryl Streep
Obsession is an attractive thing. People who are really, really interested and good at one thing and smart are attractive, if they’re men.
– Meryl Streep
It is well that the earth is round that we do not see too far ahead.
– Meryl Streep
Grace, respect, reserve, and empathetic listening are qualities sorely missing from the public discourse now.
– Meryl Streep
Acting is not about being someone different. It’s finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.
– Meryl Streep
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.
– Meryl Streep
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.
– Meryl Streep
I know movies are a function of our dream world. And when you project yourself on screen, it’s easier to project yourself into what you were, not what you are.
– Meryl Streep
Every single decision I make about what material I do, what I’m putting out in the world, is because of my children.
– Meryl Streep
My job is usually to express emotion as freely as possible.
– Meryl Streep
It’s bizarre that the produce manager is more important to my children’s health than the pediatrician.
– Meryl Streep
All that attention to the perfect lighting, the perfect this, the perfect that, I find terribly annoying.
– Meryl Streep
What does it take to be the first female anything? It takes grit, and it takes grace.
– Meryl Streep
Don’t give up or give in in the face of patronising ridicule, amused disdain, or being ignored.
– Meryl Streep
It’s amazing how easily people are led to fury and chaos. Unhappy people with guns are not going to make this country great.
– Meryl Streep
Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials.
– Meryl Streep
The interesting thing about being a mother is that everyone wants pets, but no one but me cleans the kitty litter.
– 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.
– Meryl Streep
I’m never so sure as I was in my mid-20s.
– Meryl Streep
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.
– Meryl Streep