Streep: "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."

Streep: "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."

Streep: "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."

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

Streep: "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."

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

Streep: "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."

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

Streep: "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."

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

Streep: "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."

Streep: "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."

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

Streep: "Expensive clothes are a waste of money."

Streep: "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."

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

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

Streep: "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."

Streep: "I can't stand most things that I see."

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

Streep: "Enough people write about me every day without even interviewing me."

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

Streep: "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."

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

Streep: "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."

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

Streep: "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."

Streep: "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.'"

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

Streep: "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."

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

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

Streep: "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."

Streep: "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."

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

Streep: "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."

Streep: "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."

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

Streep: "I need to go where people are serious about acting."

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

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

Streep: "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."

Streep: "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."

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

Streep: "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."

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

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

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

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