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Meryl Streep [1949-0] American

Rank: 101
Actress

Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep is an American actress and singer. Cited in the media as the "best actress of her generation", — a designation she objects to — Streep is particularly known for her versatility in her roles, transformation into the characters she plays, and her accent adaptation.

Beauty, Faith, Great, Home, Imagination, Mom, Money, Movies, Parenting, Power, Space, Work

Quote	Tags	Rank
The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.	Great, Power	101
Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.		102
There are improbable things suspended in space, like the earth.	Space	103
I have a very busy life, and not many people who have a career and four kids go out a lot to the movies.	Movies	104
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.	Work	105
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.		106
I didn't have any confidence in my beauty when I was young. I felt like a character actress, and I still do.	Beauty	107
Having been let out of the barn once, I know I wouldn't be happy if I were home all the time.	Home	108
Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials.	Mom	109
I get a trickling few scripts that I'm lucky enough that some of them are great. I don't get loads of scripts.		110
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.		111
I want to feel my life while I'm in it.		112
People say, When you have children, everything changes. But maybe things are awakened that were already there.		113
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.		114
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.		115
All an actor has is their blind faith that they are who they say they are today, in any scene.	Faith	116
I have a very good life - I'm lucky enough not to be deprived.		117
The progression of roles you take strings together a portrait of an actor, but it's a completely random process.		118
Expensive clothes are a waste of money.	Money	119
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.		120
The interesting thing about being a mother is that everyone wants pets, but no one but me cleans the kitty litter.	Parenting	121
I need to go where people are serious about acting.		122
Instant gratification is not soon enough.		123
Chris Cooper is one of my favorite actors in the world. I've seen him in most everything he's done.		124
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.		125
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.		126
My job is usually to express emotion as freely as possible.		201
My feeling about fears is, if you voice your fears, they may come true. I'm superstitious enough to believe that.		202
Enough people write about me every day without even interviewing me.		203
My family really does come first. It always did and always will.		204
The work will stand, no matter what.		205
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.		206
You win an Oscar, it can double the audience that you had before.		207
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.		208
I'm older. There's some sort of seniority. As a matter of fact, the seniority ebbs as you get older.		209
All that attention to the perfect lighting, the perfect this, the perfect that, I find terribly annoying.		210
I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs. Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me.	Imagination	211
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.		212
I can't stand most things that I see.		213
How you first meet the public is how the industry sees you. You can't argue with them. That's their perception.		214
If I am not confident that I can portray the character perfectly on screen, I won't even try.		215
Obsession is an attractive thing. People who are really, really interested and good at one thing and smart are attractive, if they're men.		216
There's no road map on how to raise a family: it's always an enormous negotiation.		217
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.		218
Personality is immediately apparent, from birth, and I don't think it really changes.		219
I think your self emerges more clearly over time.		220
For me, clothes are kind of character; I don't follow fashion or understand trends.		221
Interestingly, young people don't come to you for advice. Especially the ones who are related to you.		222
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.		223
It is well that the earth is round that we do not see too far ahead.		224
It's bizarre that the produce manager is more important to my children's health than the pediatrician.		225
You can't get spoiled if you do your own ironing.		226
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.		301
The work is the most fun; it seems illicit how much fun it is.		302
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.		303
There are wonderfully talented actresses. It's a really rich field. There isn't as rich a field of material.		304
The reason I chose the movies that I did was based on where they were being filmed.		305
I'm never so sure as I was in my mid-20s.		306
Sometimes with my children, I remember exactly how I felt as the child in this situation, not just how it feels to be me.		307
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.		308
America doesn't reward people of my age, either in day-to-day life or for their performances.		309
Every single decision I make about what material I do, what I'm putting out in the world, is because of my children.		310
The more you are in this business, the more humbled by it you become.		311
I have four to five months, tops, per year to give to my acting work.		312
I'm all over the place.		313
Service is the only thing that's important about love. Everybody is worried about 'losing yourself' - all this narcissism. Duty. We can't stand that idea now either... But duty might be a suit of armor you put on to fight for your love.		314
I remember, as I was hovering around 40, I thought each movie would be my last, really.		315
What does it take to be the first female anything? It takes grit, and it takes grace.		316
The aggregate of everybody's emotion, it's such a powerful thing. You can see it in the Trump rallies, where people - I just know, in their living rooms, would be better people - are driven to the worst possibilities by the bloodlust in a crowd. It just gets ginned up, and they're outside of themselves.		317
I'm really interested in the collaborative thing. It's what makes it scary because you never know what it's going to end up like. But you hope. You put yourself in the hands of the best people you can find, and you're completely dependent on the kindness of strangers and their commitment. It's like this mutual delusion.		318
Don't waste so much time thinking about how much you weigh. There is no more mind-numbing, boring, idiotic, self-destructive diversion from the fun of living.		319
Grace, respect, reserve, and empathetic listening are qualities sorely missing from the public discourse now.		320
Don't give up or give in in the face of patronising ridicule, amused disdain, or being ignored.		321
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.		322
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.		323
I didn't really like opera. I liked cheerleading and boys and, later, smoking. So my opera career was cut short when I was 15. My dad got sick, and we couldn't afford the lessons, so I stopped and became a cheerleader and wrecked my voice.		324
I think I'm not a natural performer; I think I'm an actor.		325
I know what I do and what it means to me and where its sources lie, and that's mine. It still is mine.		326
I am a humanist. I am for nice, easy balance.		401
Men should look at the world as if something is wrong when their voices predominate. They should feel it.		402
People at agencies and studios, including the parent boards, might look around the table at the decision-making level and feel something is wrong if half their participants are not women. Because our tastes are different, what we value is different. Not better, different.		403
Nobody can swashbuckle a quick-witted riposte like Emma Thompson. She's a writer, a real writer, and she has a relish for the well-chosen word.		404
Disney, who brought joy, arguably, to billions of people, was, perhaps, or had some... racist proclivities. He formed and supported an anti-Semitic industry lobby. And he was certainly, on the evidence of his company's policies, a gender bigot.		405
Hillary Clinton has taken some fire over 40 years of her fight for families and children. How does she do it? That's what I want to know. Where does she get her grit and her grace? Where do any of our female firsts, our pathbreakers, where do they find that strength?		406
I don't know very much about, honestly, about the Middle East, and yet I've played a lot of different people from a lot of different cultures. The thing that I notice is that we're all - there is a core of humanity that travels right through every culture. And, after all, we're all from Africa originally.		407
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.		408
I can't do a lot of things, like golf. I don't like golf. I mean, I really don't, because I tend to like things that I can do right away. If I can't do it right away, I don't like it.		409
I have a very clear understanding of what my voice is. It's like a B voice. It hovers around B-minus, B-plus. I have great friends who are wonderful singers, and I know I'll never be able to do that. But singing through a character is something I can do.		410
It's amazing how easily people are led to fury and chaos. Unhappy people with guns are not going to make this country great.		411
I think you have to listen to the people who are deeply unhappy. You have to find the source of it and not overreact to the craziness in it.		412
You can't strategize falling in love, can you? It's never worked. People love you the most and set you up, and it doesn't work because you can't predict these things. You fall in love serially.		413
I let the actions of my life stand for what I am as a human being. Contend with that, not the words.		414
When I was a kid, when I was 16, 17, I'd come home from high school, and my dad collected all of Barbra Streisand's records. And she was very young then. I think she probably had three records out, and she was 21, and we had them all. And I knew every single song, every breath, every elision, every swell. And I sang along to it.		415
It's a good thing to imagine yourself doing something you think you can't. I do that every day because, basically, if I had it my way, I'd just stay home and think about what I'm having for supper.		416
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.		417
I was offered, within one year, three different witch roles. It was almost like the world was saying - or the studios were saying - 'We don't know what to do with you.'		418
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.		419
You can't suppress the things that make us human. It's pointless to try.		420

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