Meryl Streep Quotes - Page 9

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 would never say don't do acting [to my kids], because I think it is a glorious profession and I am so thankful for everything it has let me express.

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.

You can be afraid in a press conference, nervous, sweaty, but you can't be afraid when you do your work because it doesn't work that way.

I would say, don't smoke. I'm kidding, but yeah, I did smoke in college and as a young actor and it's stupid.

That consciousness of quality, and the need to demand it can galvanize your energies, not just in your work, but in a rigorous exercise of mind and heart in every aspect of your life.

I love food and I love sex.

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

It's very humbling to imagine somebody else's really life and their pain ... It's my drug.

I really think there's a difference between how men critics see things than how women tend to. And I don't want to make that - it's not a generality and I don't want to say that, but I just feel - I know I do the same thing. There are certain things that I just am not that interested in. Certain kinds of films - I just don't enter them.

That's my way in the very beginning - how to enter it [a role]. Very quickly in the process, I don't think about voice being separate from the way you hold your head or the way you sit or the way you put on lipstick. It's all a piece of a person, and it's all driven by conviction.

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 my own life, I have noticed when I have been meeting directors, that the same sentence with the same inflection can be said by a man, like: "Get me this." But if the same thing is said by a woman, it's seen as harsh and unacceptable. That always fascinates me.

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

She [ Anne Hathaway] is just a delicious talent. I think she can delight us for years and years in lots and lots of different things.Her own personality is so appealing and fresh and open and warm. I think she can have a unique career.

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.

I feel much more comfortable dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. I'm wearing very fancy clothes today. It's Valentino. But the film ["Devil Wears Prada"] did not make me change my style. If anything, 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.

Most of the great practitioners of the art of acting know exactly what they're doing; even in the best, most successful moments, when they let go of the awareness of what they are doing, they still, somewhere deep inside their body, know what they're doing. There is a craft.

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

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

The fairy tale that really scared me was Bluebeard. That's the one where he just kills one after another of these woman, these wives, that he lures up to the castle. I just think about fairy tales as stories women told their children to warn them? To keep them safe, to make sure they married up, all the things that would have safeguarded them in the olden days.

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.

We're viewed as equals - but we're still not there yet. The challenge for our girls, I think, is dealing with that resistance. How can we lift and defuse it, how do we make it so our equality is not so threatening? Our girls are going to have to contend with that. I contend with it right now in every realm I operate in.

When you're an actor and there's no music, you have to sort of bring it all yourself.

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