Meryl Streep
The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.Collection: Power
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.Collection: Alone
There's no road map on how to raise a family: it's always an enormous negotiation.Collection: Family
The reason I chose the movies that I did was based on where they were being filmed.Collection: Movies
I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs. Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me.Collection: Imagination
The interesting thing about being a mother is that everyone wants pets, but no one but me cleans the kitty litter.Collection: Parenting
It's bizarre that the produce manager is more important to my children's health than the pediatrician.Collection: Health
Grace, respect, reserve, and empathetic listening are qualities sorely missing from the public discourse now.Collection: Respect
Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials.Collection: Mom
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?Collection: Strength
I have a very busy life, and not many people who have a career and four kids go out a lot to the movies.Collection: Movies
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.Collection: Movies
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.Collection: Movies
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.Collection: Hope
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.
Don't give up or give in in the face of patronising ridicule, amused disdain, or being ignored.
What does it take to be the first female anything? It takes grit, and it takes grace.
You can't get spoiled if you do your own ironing.
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.
The work will stand, no matter what.
It is well that the earth is round that we do not see too far ahead.
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.
All an actor has is their blind faith that they are who they say they are today, in any scene.
My feeling about fears is, if you voice your fears, they may come true. I'm superstitious enough to believe that.
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.
Obsession is an attractive thing. People who are really, really interested and good at one thing and smart are attractive, if they're men.
You can't suppress the things that make us human. It's pointless to try.
Every single decision I make about what material I do, what I'm putting out in the world, is because of my children.
I think I'm not a natural performer; I think I'm an actor.
There are wonderfully talented actresses. It's a really rich field. There isn't as rich a field of material.
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.
Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.
Expensive clothes are a waste of money.
I have a very good life - I'm lucky enough not to be deprived.
I know what I do and what it means to me and where its sources lie, and that's mine. It still is mine.
Instant gratification is not soon enough.
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.
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.
I want to feel my life while I'm in it.
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.
My family really does come first. It always did and always will.
I let the actions of my life stand for what I am as a human being. Contend with that, not the words.
The work is the most fun; it seems illicit how much fun it is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All that attention to the perfect lighting, the perfect this, the perfect that, I find terribly annoying.
My job is usually to express emotion as freely as possible.
For me, clothes are kind of character; I don't follow fashion or understand trends.