Meryl Streep

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.

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

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.

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. Don't let your special character and values, the secret that you know and no one else does, the truth - don't let that get swallowed up by the great chewing complacency.

My own sense of well-being and purpose in the world. That comes from studying the world feelingly, with empathy in my work. It comes from staying alert and alive and involved in the lives of the people that I love and the people in the wider world who need my help.

I've thought a lot about the power of empathy. In my work, it's the current that connects me and my actual pulse to a fictional character in a made up story, it allows me to feel, pretend feelings and sorrows and imagined pain.

I would like Martin Scorsese to be interested in a female character once in a while, but I don’t know if I’ll live that long.

Pretending is not just play. Pretending is imagined possibility. Pretending, or acting, is a very valuable life skill and we do it all the time.

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.

When your kids come home, they don't necessarily want to talk to you. They just want to know you're standing there, ready to talk.

Take your heart to work and ask the most and best of everybody.

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

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

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

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.