Top 180 Meryl Streep Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “We change who we are to fit the exogenous of our time, and not just strategically or to our own advantage, sometimes sympathetically without our even knowing it for the betterment of the whole group.”

— Meryl Streep

103. “Personality is immediately apparent, from birth, and I don’t think it really changes.”

— Meryl Streep

104. “I need to go where people are serious about acting.”

— Meryl Streep

105. “Life is all about making choices and I’m very happy with mine. I have had a wonderful time raising four children and I’ve also been lucky to have the support of a wonderful husband.”

— Meryl Streep

106. “Teachers perform major miracles in America, daily.”

— Meryl Streep

107. “The key to every actor is deep, deep insecurity.”

— Meryl Streep

108. “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.”

— Meryl Streep

109. “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

110. “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.”

— Meryl Streep

111. “One must be brave if one is to take the wheel.”

— Meryl Streep

112. “I have a very good life – I’m lucky enough not to be deprived.”

— Meryl Streep

113. “I found it unbearable when I allow the song to meet the music, to allow the story to meet the music.”

— Meryl Streep

114. “What’s worse than brutality that dehumanizes women? Tolerance and indifference towards it.”

— Meryl Streep

115. “I just take every day is a miracle and I’m really glad that I’m still working and that people are not sick of me, even though even I’m sick of me a little bit.”

— Meryl Streep

116. “Pretending is a very valuable life skill.”

— Meryl Streep

117. “The career I chose was a drama major in college, at Yale, when I played a 90-year-old woman. One of my most celebrated roles. Then I played a really fat person. I played a lot of different things. That’s how I thought I loved to wrangle my talent, my need to express myself. I like to do it that way.”

— Meryl Streep

118. “Some people hold themselves above the fashion business but are still complicit and fall prey to it.”

— Meryl Streep

119. “I don’t have time to read a lot. And when I do, I read things that have just the facts.”

— Meryl Streep

120. “When my children were very young and I was working I had someone cooking for me. I don’t have a cook now, I haven’t had one for a number of years and I do it myself. But when they were all little it was hard to pay attention to everyone’s homework at the end of the day and make dinner.”

— Meryl Streep

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

— Meryl Streep

122. “All an actor has is their blind faith that they are who they say they are today, in any scene.”

— Meryl Streep

123. “My own sense of well-being and purpose in the world. That comes from studying the world feelingly, with empathy in my work. It comes from staying alert and alive and involved in the lives of the people that I love and the people in the wider world who need my help.”

— Meryl Streep

124. “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.”

— Meryl Streep

125. “I think it is typical for many men to have problems when their wives make more money then they do, or when their wives are higher on the corporate ladder than they find themselves. I think that often is an issue.”

— Meryl Streep

126. “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

127. “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

128. “I have a lot of people to thank and I’m going to be one of those people that tries to mention a lot of names, because I know just two seconds ago my mother and father went completely berserk and I’d like to give some other mothers and fathers that same opportunity.”

— Meryl Streep

129. “Sometime really good writing does you a disservice as an actor. Because you can get lazy. It’s doing a lot of the work for you. I guess that’s good. But at the same time with material that’s not so good, you have to be more inventive, because no thought has been applied to it.”

— Meryl Streep

130. “I separated myself in Prada because I didn’t want to have fun. They were all having a lot of fun – Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci – and they were a little coterie of laughs.”

— Meryl Streep

131. “A man has always been seen as someone who works hard and has a full-time occupation. I think women should have the same opportunity and not have any stigma attached to them if they choose to pursue their careers.”

— Meryl Streep

132. “I’ve been making a lot of pasta. It’s easy. There are unusual tastes that you can combine. I cook because my kids like a certain kind of thing and then they want it over and over.”

— Meryl Streep

133. “I love acting, of course, but being with my husband and my children always brought me the greatest joy and happiness in life.”

— Meryl Streep

134. “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.”

— Meryl Streep

135. “So it’s not a thing that’s a struggle. It’s work, but it’s not a struggle. It’s fun. And she had a very particular way of emphasizing points and making her point, and that had to do with bringing out a word that you didn’t normally think was the most important word in the sentence.”

— Meryl Streep

136. “I have a lot to say about the world, clearly. I can’t put together a clear sentence about it all, but through the work I can say what I think.”

— Meryl Streep

137. “When I was younger I spent way too much time thinking about me being too fat. So stupid.”

— Meryl Streep

138. “I guess a normal woman would find it extremely enjoyable to wear fancy clothes. For me, I didn’t enjoy it. It felt like a straight jacket.”

— Meryl Streep

139. “Tonight we light these candles to honor the value and the work of Jyoti Singh’s short, promising life, she was India’s daughter. Tonight she’s our daughter too.”

— Meryl Streep

140. “It’s sort of my fun to sing along with records and imitate people who are on the telephone that have different ways of speaking.”

— Meryl Streep

141. “The work is the most fun; it seems illicit how much fun it is.”

— Meryl Streep

142. “The interesting thing about being a mother is that everyone wants pets, but no one but me cleans the kitty litter.”

— Meryl Streep

143. “It’s harder for men to imagine themselves as the girl in the movies than it is for me to imagine myself as Daniel Craig bringing down the building.”

— Meryl Streep

144. “They filled our lives so much, the films they were in made us laugh, think and cry. Through their work they shared a piece of our soul. We will miss them with the sadness with which we miss an old friend.”

— Meryl Streep

145. “I feel very strongly that we make decisions about what we’re giving to the world, what we’re withholding from the world, by virtue of what we put on our bodies.”

— Meryl Streep

146. “I don’t think we can say that all working women will get divorced – it’s so dangerous to make these things emblematic of anything – but having said that, every person who has a big, important job and tries to have a family, has to make decisions every single minute.”

— Meryl Streep

147. “I’m never so sure as I was in my mid-20s.”

— Meryl Streep

148. “While I am overwhelmingly proud of work that I, believe me, did not do on my own, I can assure you that awards have very little bearing on my own personal happiness, my own sense of well-being and purpose in the world.”

— Meryl Streep

149. “Well, I got better after this, and my entire family really did appreciate it. Usually, they’re resentful of movies that I go off and make, but this one had a bonus attached. But yeah, she had no breath.”

— Meryl Streep

150. “On every film, the clothes are half the battle in creating the character. I have a great deal of opinion about how my people are presented. We show a great deal by what we put on our bodies.”

— Meryl Streep