Top 180 Meryl Streep Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “I do think sometimes when scrolling through the TV and there’s something on and I look at it and I think oh, my god. I thought I was fat? What is my problem?”

— Meryl Streep

152. “For me, clothes are kind of character; I don’t follow fashion or understand trends.”

— Meryl Streep

153. “If everybody that had two cars had a Prius instead of an SUV, we wouldn’t be in the Middle East right now.”

— Meryl Streep

154. “I can’t stand most things that I see.”

— Meryl Streep

155. “I have a very busy life, and not many people who have a career and four kids go out a lot to the movies.”

— Meryl Streep

156. “I really worked very hard to bring my voice back because I used to have a good voice, and to try to do my exercises that I remember from Yale and all the things in the olden days, clearing your sinuses and all that.”

— Meryl Streep

157. “All that attention to the perfect lighting, the perfect this, the perfect that, I find terribly annoying.”

— Meryl Streep

158. “Anyone who wants to achieve something, needs a lot of work.”

— Meryl Streep

159. “I don’t really talk about my process very much, because I feel like if I give something away, it might not come back.”

— Meryl Streep

160. “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.”

— Meryl Streep

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

— Meryl Streep

162. “You win an Oscar, it can double the audience that you had before.”

— Meryl Streep

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

— Meryl Streep

164. “Every single decision I make about what material I do, what I’m putting out in the world, is because of my children.”

— Meryl Streep

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

— Meryl Streep

166. “The progression of roles you take strings together a portrait of an actor, but it’s a completely random process.”

— Meryl Streep

167. “I get a trickling few scripts that I’m lucky enough that some of them are great. I don’t get loads of scripts.”

— Meryl Streep

168. “There have been directors that I did not enjoy working with, but for the most part I realize that I have been unbelievably spoiled in my career because I have worked with some of the greatest, greatest directors ever.”

— Meryl Streep

169. “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.”

— Meryl Streep

170. “It’s hard to negotiate the present landscape with a brain and a female body.”

— Meryl Streep

171. “I wonder which of the megaton bombs Jesus, our President’s personal savior, would have personally dropped on the sleeping families of Baghdad?”

— Meryl Streep

172. “Interestingly, young people don’t come to you for advice. Especially the ones who are related to you.”

— Meryl Streep

173. “People have to make their own decisions about their lives.”

— Meryl Streep

174. “Enough people write about me every day without even interviewing me.”

— Meryl Streep

175. “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.”

— Meryl Streep

176. “I had a number of great teachers and the ones that really were the strongest influences on me were women. They were really, really smart and interesting women.”

— Meryl Streep

177. “For me, clothes are kind of a character. They’re more interesting in those terms.”

— Meryl Streep

178. “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.”

— Meryl Streep

179. “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.”

— Meryl Streep

180. “Acting is being susceptible to what is around you, and it’s letting it all come in. Acting is a clearing away of everything except what you want and need – and it’s wonderful in that way. And when it’s right, you’re lost in the moment.”

— Meryl Streep

181. “Being a celebrity has taught me to hide, but being an actor has opened my soul.”

— Meryl Streep

182. “Let’s face it, we were all once three-year-olds who stood in the middle of the living room and everybody thought we were so adorable. Only some of us grow up and get paid for it.”

— Meryl Streep

183. “I get nervous calling myself an artist. I feel I’m more like an interpreter or a violinist, you know.”

— Meryl Streep

184. “Sometimes it’s easier for people who are in authority to be authoritarian, because people know where you stand.”

— Meryl Streep

185. “There are wonderfully talented actresses. It’s a really rich field. There isn’t as rich a field of material.”

— Meryl Streep

186. “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.”

— Meryl Streep

187. “I have four to five months, tops, per year to give to my acting work.”

— Meryl Streep

188. “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.”

— Meryl Streep

189. “I think that we pay much more attention to fashion and our hair, skin and foreheads, our abdominal muscles and shoes than what is happening in the world. We willingly take that ‘drug’ and go along with that.”

— Meryl Streep

190. “Women are the last group anyone cares about in Hollywood.”

— Meryl Streep

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

— Meryl Streep

192. “The reason I chose the movies that I did was based on where they were being filmed.”

— Meryl Streep

193. “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.”

— Meryl Streep

194. “I feel like I run a business although I haven’t one. It’s planning, planning, and planning.”

— Meryl Streep

195. “I never thought I was somebody that would be on the cover of magazines in fashions, wearing fashions. It’s like not me. But that is what movie stardom entails.”

— Meryl Streep

196. “If I am not confident that I can portray the character perfectly on screen, I won’t even try.”

— Meryl Streep

197. “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.”

— Meryl Streep