Happy Birthday Meryl Streep!

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

I'm all over the place.

I wonder which of the megaton bombs Jesus, our President's personal savior, would have personally dropped on the sleeping families of Baghdad?

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.

Pretending is a very valuable life skill.

I think your self emerges more clearly over time.

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.

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

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.

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.

The thing that you have to fight the most when you lose is you feel like the biggest failure in the world.

You can't get spoiled if you do your own ironing.

People want what they want. Sometimes you just have to walk in defiance of it and just be yourself.

What does it take to be the first female anything? It takes grit, and it takes grace.

The key to every actor is deep, deep insecurity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Grace, respect, reserve, and empathetic listening are qualities sorely missing from the public discourse now.

Expensive clothes are a waste of money. 

Don't give up or give in in the face of patronising ridicule, amused disdain, or being ignored.

Obsession is an attractive thing. People who are really, really interested and good at one thing and smart are attractive, if they're men.

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.

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

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.

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.

I know what I do and what it means to me and where its sources lie, and that's mine. It still is mine.

I need to go where people are serious about acting.

Men should look at the world as if something is wrong when their voices predominate. They should feel it.

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.

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. 

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.

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?

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 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.

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.

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.

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

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.

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

It's amazing how easily people are led to fury and chaos. Unhappy people with guns are not going to make this country great.

There are wonderfully talented actresses. It's a really rich field. There isn't as rich a field of material.

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. 

Sometimes with my children, I remember exactly how I felt as the child in this situation, not just how it feels to be me. 

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.'

Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials.

You can't suppress the things that make us human. It's pointless to try.

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

That is the simple secret. Always take your heart to work.

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.

What makes you different or weird, that's your strength.

For me, clothes are kind of character; I don't follow fashion or understand trends.

Every easy choice will have its consequence tomorrow.

I remember, as I was hovering around 40, I thought each movie would be my last, really.

The minute you start caring about what other people think, is the minute you stop being yourself.

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.

The formula of happiness and success is just, being actually yourself, in the most vivid possible way you can.

I think I'm not a natural performer; I think I'm an actor. 

I think that you find your own way. You have your own rules. You have your own understanding of yourself, and that's what you're going to count on. In the end, it's what feels right to you. Not what your mother told you. Not what some actress told you. Not what anybody else told you but the still, small voice.

I have a very good life - I'm lucky enough not to be deprived.

Everything that truly makes us happy is quite simple - love, sex and food!

I am a humanist. I am for nice, easy balance.

People will say to me, 'You've played so many strong women' and I'll say, 'Have you ever said to a man, 'You've played so many strong men?' No! Because the expectation is men are varied. Why can't we have that expectation about women?

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.

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.

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.

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. 

I can't stand most things that I see.

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.

Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.

I let the actions of my life stand for what I am as a human being. Contend with that, not the words.

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

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.

I want to feel my life while I'm in it.

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.

My job is usually to express emotion as freely as possible.

I get a trickling few scripts that I'm lucky enough that some of them are great. I don't get loads of scripts.

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

There's no road map on how to raise a family: it's always an enormous negotiation.

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

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.

Personality is immediately apparent, from birth, and I don't think it really changes.

It's bizarre that the produce manager is more important to my children's health than the pediatrician.

Enough people write about me every day without even interviewing me.

Instant gratification is not soon enough.

I'm in show business. I believe in illusion and delusions and in holding aloft the bubble of a dream of some sort because, really, there are lots of reasons to look at the chasm. But art and music, these ineffables, they're just - they're the consolations of what human beings can create and make, and delight is accessible, you know, should you care to find it.

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.

You have to embrace getting older. Life is precious, and when you've lost a lot of people, you realize that each day is a gift.

I'm never so sure as I was in my mid-20s.

We need art as much as we need good works. You need it like food. You need it for inspiration, to keep going on the days that you're low. We need each other in that way.

Interestingly, young people don't come to you for advice. Especially the ones who are related to you.

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.

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.

My advice: Don't waste so much time worrying about your skin or your weight. Develop what you do, what you put your hands on in the world.

If I am not confident that I can portray the character perfectly on screen, I won't even try.

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

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

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.

The work will stand, no matter what.

It's amazing what you can get if you quietly, clearly and authoritatively demand it.

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.

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

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

I believe in a world of opposites and that’s why I avoid people with rigid and inflexible personalities.

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.

I think the best role models for women are people who are fruitfully and confidently themselves, who bring light into the world.

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

The work itself is the reward, and if I choose challenging work, it'll pay me back with interest. At least I'll be interested, even if nobody else is.

I didn't have any confidence in my beauty when I was young. I felt like a character actress, and I still do.

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

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

Fear focuses the mind.

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.

True freedom is understanding that we have a choice in who and what we allow to have power over us.

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

For young women, I would say don't worry so much about your weight. Girls spend way too much time thinking about that, and there are better things. For young men, and women, too, what makes you different or weird-that's your strength. Everyone tries to look a cookie-cutter kind of way, and actually the people who look different are the ones who get picked up. I used to hate my nose. Now I don't. It's OK.

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

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.

The more you are in this business, the more humbled by it you become.

Put blinders on to those things that conspire to hold you back, especially the ones in your own head.

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

You don't have to be famous. You just have to make your mother and father proud of you.

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

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