Top 180 Meryl Streep Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “In other characters, it’s driven by insecurity, or it’s driven by fear, or – there’s always a driver. And all the physical manifestations, you need your way in.”

— Meryl Streep

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

— Meryl Streep

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

— Meryl Streep

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

— Meryl Streep

55. “We all make the mistake thinking that how you look makes you more worthy of love.”

— Meryl Streep

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

— Meryl Streep

57. “The best thing about acting is when you’re playing a scene and you actually become your character and lose yourself in that moment. That’s when you know you’ve been succeeded at what you’ve worked very hard to accomplish in your profession. Those are the truly thrilling moments.”

— Meryl Streep

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

— Meryl Streep

59. “Having wrinkles is at once strange and exciting.”

— Meryl Streep

60. “I do honestly think that if women were running the world there would be more investment in peace, because basically as women we do not want to see our children killed. Maybe I am completely idealistic, but until we see women in equal positions of power in the world, I just think that we are doomed.”

— Meryl Streep

61. “You have been told that Real Life is not like college, and you have been correctly informed. Real Life is more like high school.”

— Meryl Streep

62. “Everyone is interesting. Everyone has something unexpected to offer and the job of acting is to pull it out of each other.”

— Meryl Streep

63. “Women are better at acting then men. Why? Because we have to be. If successfully convincing someone bigger than you are of something he doesn’t want to know is a survival skill, this is how women have survived through the millennia.”

— Meryl Streep

64. “Pretending is not just play. Pretending is imagined possibility. Pretending, or acting, is a very valuable life skill and we do it all the time.”

— Meryl Streep

65. “Instant gratification is not soon enough.”

— Meryl Streep

66. “I have a theory that movies operate on the level of dreams, where you dream yourself.”

— Meryl Streep

67. “As there begins to be less time ahead of you, you want to be exactly who you are, without making it easier for everyone else.”

— Meryl Streep

68. “I have always regarded myself as the pillar of my life.”

— Meryl Streep

69. “You didn’t have to work to keep your fear up, your energy up, or your anxiety. It is all kind of built into the process.”

— Meryl Streep

70. “Fear focuses the mind.”

— Meryl Streep

71. “Singing and acting are very similar. Singing makes you reach into your deepest feelings. Singing is an extension of everything that you do when you’re acting.”

— Meryl Streep

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

— Meryl Streep

73. “My success has depended wholly on putting things over on people, so I’m not sure that I’m that great a role model. I am, however, an expert on pretending to be an expert on pretending to be an expert.”

— Meryl Streep

74. “It is interesting how fashion filters down and we discover in the “Devil Wears Prada” that we’re all prey to trends, even if we think we are not.”

— Meryl Streep

75. “I feel much more comfortable dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. “Devil Wears Prada” did not make me change my style. But 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.”

— Meryl Streep

76. “Some men can maintain cragginess and weary masculinity. Women just get old.”

— Meryl Streep

77. “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

78. “Expensive clothes are a waste of money.”

— Meryl Streep

79. “I never look a gift horse in the mouth. And I’ve been really, really lucky. My career has been given to me by the people I’ve worked with. The actors, the directors, the cinematographers, the writers, all of whom gave me the opportunity to work in the way that I have and I’m really grateful.”

— Meryl Streep

80. “I’m all over the place.”

— Meryl Streep

81. “What led me to that was I have never – I mean, I watch movies and I don’t care who is the protagonist. I feel what that guy is feeling. You know, if it’s Tom Cruise leaping over a building – I want to make it, you know? And I’m going to – yes, I made it. And yeah, so I get that.”

— Meryl Streep

82. “I thought, “Why? and how did we evolve with this weak, and useless passion in tact within the deep heart’s core?” And the answer as I’ve formulated it to myself is that empathy is the engine that powers all the best in us.”

— Meryl Streep

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

— Meryl Streep

84. “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

85. “My mother was someone that walked into a room and lit it up. She made friends easily and she communicated her enthusiasms with great joy. I always wanted to be more like my mother than I am. I loved and admired her very deeply.”

— Meryl Streep

86. “I get nervous the more time I have to think about something so I deliberately don’t give myself too much time between jobs. I take a big break and then I start working again usually.”

— Meryl Streep

87. “I never give any character I play less respect than I give my own life.”

— Meryl Streep

88. “I follow no doctrine. I don’t belong to a church or a temple or a synagogue or an ashram.”

— Meryl Streep

89. “You can’t sing when you’re upset. You can’t sing when you’re crying. You get all congested and disgusting.”

— Meryl Streep

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

— Meryl Streep

91. “I would like Martin Scorsese to be interested in a female character once in a while, but I don’t know if I’ll live that long.”

— Meryl Streep

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

— Meryl Streep

93. “Young people who learn the arts do better in every phase of their lives.”

— Meryl Streep

94. “I am not always happy. I am happy in front of the press. I can be extremely grumpy, ask my husband.”

— Meryl Streep

95. “When I was in – at Vassar, and I came from a public high school in New Jersey, there was – that class still existed. I think it’s pretty much gone, but there was a way of talking that the private school girls had that was different than the way I talked from New Jersey.”

— Meryl Streep

96. “Acting has to reach everybody on some level – it’s a communication of feeling – but as far as judging the work is concerned, it is, I think, something that actors know about.”

— Meryl Streep

97. “If you have been touched by the success fairy, people think you know why. People think success breeds enlightenment and you are duty-bound to spread around like manure. Fertilize those young minds!”

— Meryl Streep

98. “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

99. “I don’t have a favorite director just like I don’t have a favorite color or I don’t have a favorite food. I like everything.”

— Meryl Streep

100. “My job is usually to express emotion as freely as possible.”

— Meryl Streep