Quotes from Meryl Streep

Guard your good mood.

The idea that people do very bad things for sometimes very good reasons, feels reasons.

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

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

Wrinkled, wrinkled little star... hope they never see the scars.

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

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.

Expensive clothes are a waste of money.

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 think your self emerges more clearly over time.

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

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 don't like to be gone all weekend and at night too. Because for 20 years, I've had children who are in school.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.