You can't suppress the things that make us human. It's pointless to try.
— Meryl Streep
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 let the actions of my life stand for what I am as a human being. Contend with that, not the words.
It's amazing how easily people are led to fury and chaos. Unhappy people with guns are not going to make this country great.
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.
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.
Men should look at the world as if something is wrong when their voices predominate. They should feel it.
I think I'm not a natural performer; I think I'm an actor.
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.
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.
What does it take to be the first female anything? It takes grit, and it takes grace.
Every single decision I make about what material I do, what I'm putting out in the world, is because of my children.
The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.
The work will stand, no matter what.
Interestingly, young people don't come to you for advice. Especially the ones who are related to you.
My family really does come first. It always did and always will.
Sometimes with my children, I remember exactly how I felt as the child in this situation, not just how it feels to be me.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 am a humanist. I am for nice, easy balance.
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.
Don't give up or give in in the face of patronising ridicule, amused disdain, or being ignored.
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.
I remember, as I was hovering around 40, I thought each movie would be my last, really.
America doesn't reward people of my age, either in day-to-day life or for their performances.
There are improbable things suspended in space, like the earth.
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.
For me, clothes are kind of character; I don't follow fashion or understand trends.
Enough people write about me every day without even interviewing me.
I'm never so sure as I was in my mid-20s.
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.'
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 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 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.
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?
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 know what I do and what it means to me and where its sources lie, and that's mine. It still is mine.
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.
Grace, respect, reserve, and empathetic listening are qualities sorely missing from the public discourse now.
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.
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.
It is well that the earth is round that we do not see too far ahead.
Expensive clothes are a waste of money.
If I am not confident that I can portray the character perfectly on screen, I won't even try.
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.
My feeling about fears is, if you voice your fears, they may come true. I'm superstitious enough to believe that.
