I think your self emerges more clearly over time.
— Meryl Streep
I need to go where people are serious about acting.
I have a very good life - I'm lucky enough not to be deprived.
I'm all over the place.
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 didn't have any confidence in my beauty when I was young. I felt like a character actress, and I still do.
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.
People say, When you have children, everything changes. But maybe things are awakened that were already there.
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.
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.
I'm older. There's some sort of seniority. As a matter of fact, the seniority ebbs as you get older.
I get a trickling few scripts that I'm lucky enough that some of them are great. I don't get loads of scripts.
You win an Oscar, it can double the audience that you had before.
The work is the most fun; it seems illicit how much fun it is.
I have a very busy life, and not many people who have a career and four kids go out a lot to the movies.
You can't get spoiled if you do your own ironing.
Personality is immediately apparent, from birth, and I don't think it really changes.
The progression of roles you take strings together a portrait of an actor, but it's a completely random process.
My job is usually to express emotion as freely as possible.
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.
How you first meet the public is how the industry sees you. You can't argue with them. That's their perception.
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.
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.
I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs. Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me.
I want to feel my life while I'm in it.
There are wonderfully talented actresses. It's a really rich field. There isn't as rich a field of material.
Some people are filled by compassion and a desire to do good, and some simply don't think anything's going to make a difference.
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.
Obsession is an attractive thing. People who are really, really interested and good at one thing and smart are attractive, if they're men.
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.
Instant gratification is not soon enough.
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.
The reason I chose the movies that I did was based on where they were being filmed.
Having been let out of the barn once, I know I wouldn't be happy if I were home all the time.
All an actor has is their blind faith that they are who they say they are today, in any scene.
There's no road map on how to raise a family: it's always an enormous negotiation.
I can't stand most things that I see.
The interesting thing about being a mother is that everyone wants pets, but no one but me cleans the kitty litter.
We are who we're going to be when we're very old, and when we're very old we are who we were when we were 8.
Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.
All that attention to the perfect lighting, the perfect this, the perfect that, I find terribly annoying.
I have four to five months, tops, per year to give to my acting work.
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.
The more you are in this business, the more humbled by it you become.
Chris Cooper is one of my favorite actors in the world. I've seen him in most everything he's done.
I don't know why I don't watch a lot of movies; I can barely keep up with the things my friends are in. There isn't enough time in life.
Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials.
It's bizarre that the produce manager is more important to my children's health than the pediatrician.
