Meryl Streep

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I need to go where people are serious about acting.

I say to myself, 'I don't know how to act - and why does anybody want to look at me on-screen anymore?' ... Lots of actors feel that way. What gives you strength is also your weakness - your raging insecurity.

Listening is everything. Listening is the whole deal. That's what I think. And I mean that in terms of before you work, after you work, in between work, with your children, with your husband, with your friends, with your mother, with your father. It's everything. And it's where you learn everything.

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

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.

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.

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.