Meryl Streep Quotes

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy, we can all sense a mysterious connection to each other.

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

I think the best role models for women are people who are fruitfully and confidently themselves, who bring light into the world.

No one has ever asked an actor, 'You're playing a strong-minded man…' We assume that men are strong-minded, or have opinions. But a strong-minded woman is a different animal.

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.

The formula of happiness and success is just, being actually yourself, in the most vivid possible way you can.

The names of the kids with detention were announced at every assembly, and I was always one of them. Always. Every single day. It was a running joke. The prefect would say, ‘Detentions for today…’ and I would stand up automatically. It was like the Oscars and I was Meryl Streep.

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.

This is your time and it feels normal to you, but really, there is no normal. There's only change and resistance to it and then more change.

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

It's amazing what you can get if you quietly, clearly and authoritatively demand it.

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

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

But even with my minimal amount of fame, there are certain perks. Recently, I was at a movie premier, and at the party after the movie, Meryl Streep was loose, walking around the room like a normal person. Absolutely nothing was preventing me from lunging toward her and shrieking "Dingoes ate my baby! Dingoes ate my baby!

I have a very good life - I'm lucky enough not to be deprived.

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

I no longer have patience for certain things, not because I’ve become arrogant, but simply because I reached a point in my life where I do not want to waste more time with what displeases me or hurts me. I have no patience for cynicism, excessive criticism and demands of any nature. I lost the will to please those who do not like me, to love those who do not love me and to smile at those who do not want to smile at me. I no longer spend a single minute on those who lie or want to manipulate. I decided not to coexist anymore with pretense, hypocrisy, dishonesty and cheap praise. I do not tolerate selective erudition nor academic arrogance. I do not adjust either to popular gossiping. I hate conflict and comparisons. I believe in a world of opposites and that’s why I avoid people with rigid and inflexible personalities. In friendship I dislike the lack of loyalty and betrayal. I do not get along with those who do not know how to give a compliment or a word of encouragement. Exaggerations bore me and I have difficulty accepting those who do not like animals. And on top of everything I have no patience for anyone who does not deserve my patience. NOTE: She neither said nor wrote this quote. Just because you saw it on Facebook does not mean it's true. Snopes is your friend. The quote was written by José Micard Teixeira

What a very long time one had to be an adult, after rushing through childhood and adolescence. There should be several more distinctions: the idiocy of the young twenties, when one was suddenly expected to know how to do adult things; the panicked coupling of the mid- and late twenties, when marriages happened as quickly as a game of tag; the sitcom mom period, when you finally had enough food in your freezer to survive for a month if necessary; the school principal period, when you were no longer seen as a woman at all but just a nagging authority figure. If you were lucky, there was the late-in-life sexy Mrs. Robinson period, or an accomplished and powerful Meryl Streep period, followed, of course, by approximately two decades of old crone-hood, like the woman at the end of 'Titanic

I think 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.

What makes you different or weird—that’s your strength.

The quote above about patience is NOT MERYL STREEP's-- this quote is actually from the pen of Portuguese self-help author/life coach José Micard Teixeira. PLEASE REMOVE IT!!!!!

Modern, Historical and Fictional Examples: Helena Blavatsky, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Anandamayi Ma, Kahlil Gibran, Herman Melville, Paul Gaugin, Whoopie Goldberg, Alice Walker, Mattie Stepanek, Igor Stravinsky, Meryl Streep

The thing that drew me to Lafayette as a subject - that he was that rare object of agreement in the ironically named United States - kept me coming back to why that made him unique. Namely, that we the people never agreed on much of anything. Other than a bipartisan consensus on barbecue and Meryl Streep, plus that time in 1942 when everyone from Bing Crosby to Oregonian school children heeded FDR's call to scrounge up rubber for the war effort, disunity is the through line in the national plot - not necessarily as a failing, but as a free people's privilege. And thanks to Lafayette and his cohorts in Washington's army, plus the king of France and his navy, not to mention the founding dreamers who clearly did not think through what happens every time one citizen's pursuit of happiness infuriates his neighbor, getting on each other's nerves is our right.

It seems right now that all I’ve ever done in my life is making my way here to you.’ I could see that Rosie could not place the line from The Bridges of Madison County that had produced such a powerful emotional reaction on the plane. She looked confused. ‘Don, what are you…what have you done to yourself?’ ‘I’ve made some changes.’ ‘Big changes.’ ‘Whatever behavioural modifications you require from me are a trivial price to pay for having you as my partner.’ Rosie made a downwards movement with her hand, which I could not interpret. Then she looked around the room and I followed her eyes. Everyone was watching. Nick had stopped partway to our table. I realised that in my intensity I had raised my voice. I didn’t care. ‘You are the world’s most perfect woman. All other women are irrelevant. Permanently. No Botox or implants will be required. ‘I need a minute to think,’ she said. I automatically started the timer on my watch. Suddenly Rosie started laughing. I looked at her, understandably puzzled at this outburst in the middle of a critical life decision. ‘The watch,’ she said. ‘I say “I need a minute” and you start timing. Don is not dead. 'Don, you don’t feel love, do you?’ said Rosie. ‘You can’t really love me.’ ‘Gene diagnosed love.’ I knew now that he had been wrong. I had watched thirteen romantic movies and felt nothing. That was not strictly true. I had felt suspense, curiosity and amusement. But I had not for one moment felt engaged in the love between the protagonists. I had cried no tears for Meg Ryan or Meryl Streep or Deborah Kerr or Vivien Leigh or Julia Roberts. I could not lie about so important a matter. ‘According to your definition, no.’ Rosie looked extremely unhappy. The evening had turned into a disaster. 'I thought my behaviour would make you happy, and instead it’s made you sad.’ ‘I’m upset because you can’t love me. Okay?’ This was worse! She wanted me to love her. And I was incapable. Gene and Claudia offered me a lift home, but I did not want to continue the conversation. I started walking, then accelerated to a jog. It made sense to get home before it rained. It also made sense to exercise hard and put the restaurant behind me as quickly as possible. The new shoes were workable, but the coat and tie were uncomfortable even on a cold night. I pulled off the jacket, the item that had made me temporarily acceptable in a world to which I did not belong, and threw it in a rubbish bin. The tie followed. On an impulse I retrieved the Daphne from the jacket and carried it in my hand for the remainder of the journey. There was rain in the air and my face was wet as I reached the safety of my apartment.

Social status among humans actually comes in two flavors: dominance and prestige.12 Dominance is the kind of status we get from being able to intimidate others (think Joseph Stalin), and on the low-status side is governed by fear and other avoidance instincts. Prestige, however, is the kind of status we get from being an impressive human specimen (think Meryl Streep), and it’s governed by admiration and other approach instincts.

I no longer have patience for certain things, not because I’ve become arrogant, but simply because I reached a point in my life where I do not want to waste more time with what displeases me or hurts me. I have no patience for cynicism, excessive criticism and demands of any nature. I lost the will to please those who do not like me, to love those who do not love me and to smile at those who do not want to smile at me.

Pretending is not just play. Pretending is imagined possibility. Pretending or acting is a very valuable life skill, and we all do it all the time. We don’t want to be caught doing it, but nevertheless it’s part of the adaptation of our species. We change who we are to fit the exigencies of our time.

After dinner yesterday, I went to the movies and saw Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice. Hitler’s invasion of Poland only figured in the film. In the film, Meryl Streep divorces Dustin Hoffman, but then in a commuter train she meets this civil engineer played by Robert De Niro, and remarries. A pretty all-right movie.

I poked fun at rich friends growling about the unfairness of the Electoral College over a dinner at Spago that cost thousands of dollars, and took Meryl Streep to task for her outraged anti-Trump speech at the Golden Globes the same week she’d put her Greenwich Village townhouse on the market for thirty million dollars.

Suddenly the door to one of the trailers opens, and a famous head emerges. It is a woman’s head, quite a distance away, seen in profile, like the head on a coin, and while Clarissa cannot immediately identify her (Meryl Streep? Vanessa Redgrave?) she knows without question that the woman is a movie star. She knows by her aura of regal assurance, and by the eagerness with which one of the prop men speaks to her (inaudibly to Clarissa) about the source of the noise. The woman’s head quickly withdraws, the door to the trailer closes again, but she leaves behind her an unmistakable sense of watchful remonstrance, as if an angel had briefly touched the surface of the world with one sandaled foot, asked if there was any trouble and, being told all was well, had resumed her place in the ether with skeptical gravity, having reminded the children of earth that they are just barely trusted to manage their own business, and that further carelessness will not go unremarked.

To manifest your creativity you must believe deeply in the emotional elements and patiently invest in them. Once you find your creativity, it must be encouraged and enhanced, not controlled. The best of the best—the Apples, Nikes, Michael Jordans, Andy Warhols, Meryl Streeps of the world—have it; they protect it, believe in it, and as long as they stay true to their essence they’ll continue to reap the benefits that come with creative thinking and living.

I told her Harvey Weinstein. Streep gasped. “But he supports such good causes,” she said. Weinstein had always behaved around her. She’d watched and sometimes joined in his Democratic fund-raising and philanthropy. She knew him to be a bully in the edit room. But that was it. “I believe her,” I told Jonathan later. “But you would either way, right?” he replied, considering it a thought exercise. “Yeah, I get it.” “Because she’s Meryl—” “Because she’s Meryl Streep. I get it.

In 2003, Meryl Streep won a career achievement César Award, the French equivalent of an Oscar. Streep’s words (my translation) acknowledged the enduring interest of French audiences in women’s lives and women’s stories: "I have always wanted to present stories of women who are rather difficult. Difficult to love, difficult to understand, difficult to look at sometimes. I am very cognizant that the French public is receptive to these complex and contradictory women. As an actress I have understood for a long time that lies are simple, seductive and often easy to pass off. But the truth—the truth is always very very very complicated, often unpleasant, nuanced or difficult to accept." In France, an actress can work steadily from her teens through old age—she can start out in stories of youthful rebellion and end up, fifty years later, a screen matriarch. And in the process, her career will end up telling the story of a life—her own life, in a sense, with the films serving, as Valeria Bruni Tedeschi puts it, as a “journal intime,” or diary, of one woman’s emotions and growth. No wonder so many French actresses are beautiful. They’re radiant with living in a cinematic culture that values them, and values them as women. And they are radiant with living in a culture—albeit one with flaws of its own—in which women are half of who decides what gets valued in the first place. Their films transcend national and language barriers and are the best vehicles for conveying the depth and range of women’s experience in our era. The gift they give us, so absent in our own movies, is a vision of life that values emotional truth, personal freedom and dignity above all and that favors complexity over simplicity, the human over the machine, maturity over callowness, true mysteries over false explanations and an awareness of mortality over a life lived in denial. In the luminous humanity of their faces and in the illuminated humanity of their characters, we discover in these actresses something much more inspiring than the blank perfection and perfect blankness of the Hollywood starlet. We discover the beauty of the real.

WHEN I INTERVIEWED ISABELLE HUPPERT, I mentioned in passing that she has the strongest body of work of any actress in the world. She insisted otherwise, and I insisted back, and she denied it again, and I conceded that maybe, just maybe, Meryl Streep might be tied with her in the magnificent résumé department. To which Huppert said something quite interesting: "You know, it’s more again a symptom—I mean it really tells something about our relationship to cinema in Europe, which is slightly different [than here in the U.S.]. Here it seems like, you reach a certain point, actresses work less. And maybe also we have this idea to make movies more cultural than entertaining, a more existential thing than here. And so together it makes [for] a different relation to our craft."

seems I have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It’s a lifelong appointment and there are no dues, just glory and hobnobbery. I look at the list of current members and feel woozy. In the department of literature, there’s Ann Beattie, Michael Cunningham, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Hempel, Jamaica Kincaid, David Mamet, Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Sharon Olds, Ann Patchett, Jayne Anne Phillips, Francine Prose, Marilynne Robinson, George Saunders, Wallace Shawn, Anne Tyler, Edmund White, Joy Williams, and Tobias Wolff. Really? I think. These people are gods to me. It’s like I’ve been allowed onto Mount Olympus. Then there are the departments of art (Bruce Nauman, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Susan Rothenberg), music, and architecture. Honorary members—people whose work falls outside these categories—include Bob Dylan, Meryl Streep, Frederick Wiseman, and Martin Scorsese.

Demons first. We don't know how Athena's dream compares to reality. It could have already happened or might not happen for another few days." "Who the hell is Athena?" Cillian asks. I raise my hand. "Oh, that makes so much more sense. I had questioned your mother's intelligence, naming one of you Artemis and the other Nina. The whole point to having twins is to give them matching names." "Yes," Artemis deadpans. "That's why our parents had us." Artemis was the goddess of the hunt; a protector. It fits my sister perfectly. Athena was the goddess of wisdom and war. It's never escape my notice that everyone thought Nina fit me better than my real name. Everyone except Leo. "If we have twins someday," Rhys says, "we'll give them matching names." Cillian nods in agreement, then claps his hands together. "Little Sonny and Cher will be so adorable." "Jane and Austen," Rhys says. "Meryl and Streep," Leo offers without looking back. "That's the one!" Rhys shouts. "You can be their godfather." Cilllian beams.

En nuestros días, el machismo es un poco como Meryl Streep en una nueva película: a veces no la reconoces enseguida. Puedes pasarte veinte minutos disfrutando de los dinosaurios, de las luchas espaciales y de los nostálgicos soldados confederados antes de decir: «¡Oh, Dios mío! ¡Debajo de la peluca! ES MERYL.» (p. 151).

Reading in public was my favorite pastime. Doing it at home didn’t have the same thrill. Nobody could see me reading a book in my apartment so what was the point. I preferred a crowd. You wouldn’t sing an aria to the couch, would you? I felt similarly about reading. Why waste it on no one? I was more caught up with how I looked reading the book than I was with the actual book. Always aware as I turned each page to put on a good show. Laugh just enough to indicate that I’m trying not to laugh in public. Look intently at each page, maybe adorably bite my lip in concentration at certain passages. Let a lock of hair occasionally fall into my eyes that I have to distractedly brush away. And make all of it seem completely natural. As if I’m so immersed in my book that I’m not at all aware of my surroundings. Even though I’ve clocked each person in the restaurant. Every gesture, every look, every tilt of the head is carefully considered for utmost effect. Meryl Streep put less thought into her performance as Karen Silkwood than I did as “person at counter with book.

In the copious output of the Trump Twitter feed you will find attacks on anyone and everyone – allies like Theresa May, Justin Trudeau, Macron and Merkel. You will even see him piling into cabinet colleagues if he feels they’ve fallen short; he goes after sports stars and TV personalities. Even Meryl Streep was told she was an overrated actress by the President after she had said something disobliging. And, of course, he goes after political enemies with a rare gusto. But Vladimir Putin? Try to find a critical word that he’s ever said about him. You won’t: there isn’t one.

TIME MOVED DIFFERENTLY for John Cazale. Everything went slower. He wasn’t dim, not by a long shot. But he was meticulous, sometimes maddeningly so. Even simple tasks could take hours. All of his friends knew about the slowness. It would drive them crazy. His

Perhaps we are being a bit presumptuous in calling our species “intelligent.” After all, this species has waged numerous inane wars where millions of their own were slaughtered. As a whole, this species spends trillions of hours a year watching insipid television shows. And “intelligent” is not the right name for a species that invented spam e-mails and encourages narcissistic pastimes like Facebook. Nevertheless, over the millennia, this species produced many shining lights that make us worthy of the lofty title: Blaise Pascal, Isaac Newton, David Hume, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Arthur Stanley Eddington, Emmy Noether, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Meryl Streep, and, of course, tiramisu.

Then in March 1993, everything changed. My one-year-old son, Charlie, had his first seizure. There’s absolutely nothing funny about being the parent of a child with uncontrolled epilepsy. Nothing. After a year of daily seizures, drugs, and a brain surgery, I learned that the cure for Charlie’s epilepsy, the ketogenic diet—a high fat, no sugar, limited protein diet—had been hiding in plain sight for, by then, over seventy years. And despite the diet’s being well documented in medical texts, none of the half-dozen pediatric neurologists we had taken Charlie to see had mentioned a word about it. I found out on my own at a medical library. It was life altering—not just for Charlie and my family, but for tens of thousands like us. Turns out there are powerful forces at work within our health care system that don’t necessarily prioritize good health. For decades, physicians have barely been taught diet therapy or even nutrition in medical school. The pharmaceutical, medical device, and sugar industries make hundreds of billions every year on anti-epileptic drugs and processed foods—but not a nickel if we change what we eat. The cardiology community and American Heart Association demonize fat based on flawed science. Hospitals profit from tests and procedures, but again no money from diet therapy. There is a world epilepsy population of over sixty million people. Most of those people begin having their seizures as children, and only a minuscule percentage ever find out about ketogenic diet therapies. When I realized that 99 percent of what had happened to Charlie and my family was unnecessary, and that there were millions of families worldwide in the same situation, I needed to try to do something. Nancy and I began the Charlie Foundation (charliefoundation.org) in 1994 in order to facilitate research and get the word directly to those who would benefit. Among the high points were countless articles, a couple appearances of Charlie’s story on Dateline NBC, and a movie I produced and directed about another family whose child’s epilepsy had been cured by the ketogenic diet starring Meryl Streep titled First Do No Harm (1997). Today, of course, the diet permeates social media. When we started, there was one hospital in the world offering ketogenic diet therapy. Today, there are 250. Equally important, word about the efficacy of the ketogenic diet for epilepsy spread within the scientific community. In 1995, we hosted the first of many scientific global symposia focused on the diet. As research into its mechanisms and applications has spiked, incredibly the professional communities have found the same metabolic pathway that is triggered by the ketogenic diet to reduce seizures has also been found to benefit Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, severe psychiatric disorders, traumatic brain injury, and even some cancers. I

Social status among humans actually comes in two flavors: dominance and prestige.12 Dominance is the kind of status we get from being able to intimidate others (think Joseph Stalin), and on the low-status side is governed by fear and other avoidance instincts. Prestige, however, is the kind of status we get from being an impressive human specimen (think Meryl Streep), and it’s governed by admiration and other approach instincts. Of course, these two forms of status aren’t mutually exclusive; Steve Jobs, for example, exhibited both dominance and prestige. But the two forms are analytically distinct strategies with different biological expressions. They are, as some researchers have put it, the “two ways to the top.

Meryl Streep can read your poem, and it can be in an episode of a primetime TV show, but your life is still your life—mothering and dog-walking and working. The things we call “life-changing” are and aren’t.

I can still hear you screaming,” Big Swiss said. “You know what it sounds like?” Glenn Close? Greta thought. Meryl Streep? “Badly played bagpipes,” Big Swiss said. “It’s giving me a migraine.” “Well, it was my first time screaming. Maybe I’ll practice more after you leave.

I say, trying to project a coolness I do not feel. An aloofness. A nonchalance. I am Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher! I am Meryl Streep in that movie with the nuns. My gaze falls to his mouth, to the hollow of his throat, to the triangle of skin exposed by his unbuttoned buttons, and all pretense of cool vanishes. I am Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again.

I think your self emerges more clearly over time. —Meryl Streep Acting is happy agony. —Jean-Paul Sartre

John Cazale happens once in a lifetime. He was an invention, a small perfection. It is no wonder his friends feel such anger upon waking from their sleep to discover that Cazale sleeps on with kings and counselors, with Booth and Kean, with Jimmy Dean, with Bernhardt, Guitry, and Duse, with Stanislavsky, with Groucho, Benny, and Allen. He will make fast friends in his new place. He is easy to love. John Cazale’s body betrayed him. His spirit will not. His whole life plays and replays as film, in our picture houses, in

This is your time and it feels normal to you, but really, there is no normal. There’s only change and resistance to it and then more change.

Meryl Streep disclosed in an interview with Gene Siskel that for every role she gives herself a secret, something which her character would not want others to know, and which she herself conceals from her co-stars; in “Kramer vs. Kramer” her secret was that she never had loved her husband.