Every single decision I make about what material I do, what I'm putting out in the world, is because of my children. 
On how she chooses her roles,
or as Meryl puts it, "The responsibility of my own integrity."

I was never the kind of person who said, ‘I'm going to be an actress. And if I meet somebody and have a family, great.’ I always, always, since I was a little girl, wanted to have kids and a family. I just had to wait 30 years to find somebody I liked enough.

My mother was and is my role model. Not precisely for what she did in her life, but for the way she's always done everything. She always started the day singing, she loves a good joke, she has energy and verve, wit and great natural graciousness. Everybody loves my mom because she is the Will Rogers of Women; she puts people at their ease and can diffuse any awkward social situation with a witty aside or a joke at her own expense. I've always admired this ability to lighten the atmosphere when she enters the room, and I think the best role models for women and girls are people of either gender who are fruitfully and confidently themselves, who bring light into the world.

Your reputation is something that you carry with you and it gets in the way maybe the first 5 minutes of meeting people or beginning a project. It's a thing that stands apart from who you are and how you relate. But with the exigencies of movie-making, you've got to get down to it and you've got to get working and you've got to get into each other's heads, and it all goes away as you act together, and work and uncover -- because that's all you do. And that's why I love doing it.

You have to be interested and mystified by the other person's feelings and be very, very curious about the person's heart. Not just the person you are portraying, but the person you're communicating with and the one that's unseen, the audience. I always think that if I've made a connection with my character, and I've gotten into her heart, then they can get into yours. I always think about that invisible connection among us all, what we have in common, as opposed to what divides us.
From "Meryl's Choices," Los Angeles Times Magazine

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.
Meryl's answer to Jim Lipton's question "How important is listening?" during the Actors Studio Interview on Bravo

If I had any advice for young actors or actresses -- especially actresses, because men have a lot more freedom in this area -- it's to establish early on that you're going to send vanity away. Send it packing. People so want to set you in a box. You know, early on I had this long blond hair, and I could see it coming down like a train, it was going to mow me over. I was going to be this sort of mournful, long-blond-hair woman, and it's reductive. It's reductive of my humanity and my engine. I have much more to give than that. From Pacino & Streep: Veteran's Play (EW 2003)

The goal of a real education is to bring out what you already have in you, but I didn't really know what I had in me as an actor until I was out there on the road, doing it. And I soon learned that A) I wanted to do this acting thing better than I was doing it, but B) I could actually feed and support myself and make my car payments with the teeny salary I earned as an actor in a company. With government grants, Streep took the serious plunge by attending Yale Drama School, where she quickly gained a reputation for rep. This was possible because the school's training emphasized the actor's entire instrument from feet to voice, and the presence of the Yale Repertory Theater, where she became something of a star in such productions as Brecht/Weill's Happy End. "There's no substitute for rep, where I could play the lead one night, and a robot the next, where you had to turn on a dime," Streep notes. "It's a shame that there's much too little of it in this country, because that's where an actor can really find herself. It's what I came up in and all that I know.
From "The Many Faces of Meryl," Special Issue of Variety, June 2004

BG: Despite the fact that you've been famous for many years now, there are obviously a lot of things people don't know about you, such as the fact that you have four kids.
MS: Well, they're not photographed and celebrated as my appendages, no.
BG: Has protecting your own privacy been important to your work?
MS: I don't think it helps the suspension of disbelief if everybody knows where you work out.
From an interview with Brad Goldfarb in the December 2002 issue of Interview Magazine

When I ask her the secret to such a long-lived marriage, she doesn't hesitate: "Goodwill and willingness to bend—and to shut up every once in a while." She goes on, "There's no road map on how to raise a family: it's always an enormous negotiation. But 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."
Laura Winters in Master Class -- from the December 2002 issue of Vogue

KB: In terms of style, your two new movies (this interview was granted during promotion for {The} Hours and Adaptation) are night and day. Yet, at their heart, they are about yearning. So often the characters you portray seem to be extremely complicated women who are trying to figure out how to get more out of life. Is that true?
M.S.: That accurately describes me! {Laughs} I want to feel my life while I'm in it, and 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. And maybe not even people, but animals or aliens -- whatever that thing is that leaps out of us into that imaginary being and connects us. Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.
From the Ken Burns interview in the December 2002 issue of USA Today

I look for the thing that I got from it from the beginning. Because that's the thing that intoxicates me. It's what you get when you come upon a phrase in a poem that just goes through you. How to describe that is really hard. It's some recognition of the truth of life in that phrase or in that image or in that encounter. You feel it in pivotal moments in your life: when someone is born, when you fall in love, when someone dies, when someone tells a great joke and you haven't laughed in a week and you just howl. The top flies off of your head. That's what you look for. And that's what happens in acting all the time, in moments. Surrounding that is a lot of police work, a lot of walking the beat and drudgery, but every once in a while, your adrenaline goes up. That's the addictive thing.
When asked what could possibly motivate her as she enters her third decade in the movies. (Boston Globe, 1996)

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy, we can all sense a mysterious connection to each other. I like to investigate these different women to see what the commonality is with me. When I get the script and read their story, I hear the »ping!« that makes a connection with my own life. 
Meryl on her character choices to Michael Segell, in Cosmo, May 1991

Children keep you anchored to reality. You're on a movie set and everyone gets you coffee and asks you what you need. And then I go home and I'm waiting on tables like I was in college.

The lack of good female parts for elderly women like me has two good things about it. First, I get to spend a lot more time at home with my children. And I've forgotten what the second good thing is.

Integrate what you believe into 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.
Vassar Class of '83 Commencement Address

Success is often provided by the exception to the Rules for Success. People who have broken through color and gender lines, class and cultural bias, have done so despite an array of reasons as to why they shouldn't be able to do so. In this way, success may ultimately have more to do with your own personality, focus, and optimism than your gender, race or background. Put blinders on to those things that conspire to hold you back, especially the ones in your own head. Guard your good mood. Listen to music every day, joke, and love and read more for fun, especially poetry.
University of New Hampshire Commencement Address

I've always felt older. I've always felt about 40 (and) I did have this moment when I turned 40 that I felt like my clothes finally fit. And I didn't have to be anything other than myself.

I guess when I was in Miss Julie, a Strindberg play, in college. I don't think I was any good. I was probably very grand, but there was a moment where you leave everything behind--transcendence or something. It's another state, definitely. And it's great. It's like when I used to swim and there was a point where you just fly. I always go in search of that.
On her first acting epiphany

I think I was a strange child, I liked to imagine what I would look like when I was an old woman. So I took my mother's eyebrow pencil and drew in the lines. I have this picture now, this little picture of this 10-year-old, huddled in a chair, with the saddest, sort of weathered face. It was really interesting that I liked doing that then. It wasn't that I was sad--I was just getting into character.

I'm always baffled by this question. It's, like, How could I play that part and talk like me? The problem with accents is, the day before you go in, you try it out on the other actors and they go, "God!" And they'll laugh at me and it's really so stupid because they know me, you know? I'm going to walk in all of a sudden and start talkin' this way. So there's that anxiety. But you're all sort of propping up this preposterous dream with each other, these performances. Everybody gets up in an award ceremony and says, "I owe this to . . . ," you know, whomever's there and wasn't nominated. But they're telling the truth. Because you can be destroyed by another actor not believing you.
In answer to a question she’s often asked, "Do accents help you get into character?"

Oh boy.. no matter how much you try to imagine what this is like, it’s just so incredibly thrilling right down to your toes.
On winning the Academy Award for Sophie’s Choice

Yes. I felt that with Karen Silkwood, and Isak Dinesen. But I also feel it if the character's a made-up person, because it's always based on people that I know. I didn't know Karen Silkwood, so I couldn't base it on her, but it was physically based on people that I saw and watched. And so I feel a responsibility to the truth of it.
In answer to the question, "Do you feel more responsibility playing characters based on real people."

M.S.: . . . it's really for me like auto mechanics. It's just something that's sort of - you know - it's not the most interesting part of the work. It's not emotional, it's just like something you put on.
Rosie: Yeah, but it's amazing for those 99.9% of the population who can't do it. Cause every role you watch and you go, 'How is she doing that one?'
Meryl and Rosie discussing acting on the Rosie O'Donnell Show

To be in something that people are laughing so hard that it hurts, you know? I remember seeing things that Lucille Ball was in and Carole Lombard, and my friend Tracey Ullman makes me laugh so hard. I'd love to do something like that, but as far as the dream-bubble, dream-fantasy dream, I've never wanted to fit myself into that sort of iconography of "Movie Star" or something. I've never wanted to be any bigger than I am as a human being.
Meryl's answer to the question: "What is the dream role you've always hoped to play?"

I have a bunch of favorites. I really loved playing Francesca in Bridges of Madison County, and I loved doing Postcards From the Edge, partly because it was a friend of mine who wrote it--Carrie Fisher--and it was a great shoot. And I loved making Out of Africa, and I loved the character I played in Ironweed, and A Cry in the Dark and Sophie's Choice. And Silkwood I liked doing. [ And Kramer vs. Kramer? ] I loved doing that. But we're going back a hundred and fifty years ago...!
In answer to the question, ‘What's been your favorite role?’

Acting is being susceptible to what is around you and it's letting it all come in. Acting is a clearing away of everything except what you want and need -- and it's wonderful in that way -- and when it's right, you're lost in the moment.
(In an interview with Gene Siskel, 1996)

Except for in Death Becomes Her, I've only played realistic characters in the movies," she says. "When I was at Yale, I was never in a realistic play. It was a time of hyperbolic drama that was out-sized and Brechtian, with an expressionistic kind of acting, just like performance art now. It didn't matter that it didn't bear any resemblance to real behavior. Real behavior was something that anybody could do." Yet this background gave her an edge when she arrived in the movies. "I wasn't grounded in the Method (school of acting), which is based in realism: How much does the role resemble me?" she says. "So it wasn't a big deal for me to think that I could play an old lady or somebody from another country. It wasn't a dirty trick to assume another identity.
Excerpt from Meryl Streep's interview in the article One True Role (USA Today)

All an actor has, I think, is their heart, really,... that's the place you go for your inspiration. If my heart wasn't filled with them, where would I get stuff? What would I have to express?
There's a wonderful quote of yours, you said that if it weren't for your husband (you've been married for 20 years), and your four kids, you don't believe that you would be the actress that you are today. What role do they play in your craft?
(Meryl's answer to Meredith Viera, The View Interview 9/17/98)

Get a good education,
know as much as you can about everything,
and listen - and look at the world - you know - feelingly.
When asked by an audience member during the Q/A segment of The View Interview
what advice she had for her as an aspiring actress

I'm me," she says simply.
"People who know me don't have to ask that.
And people who don't know me are not gonna find out in a 3-minute answer.
Answering Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Steve Murray's question: "Who is Meryl Streep?"

I think teaching is everything. There are a lot of great subjects in the world, very interesting subjects. Who's going to bring you to the subject? Who's going to interpret for you in this new land? It's everything! Every subject I ever studied, if the teacher was great, I got a lot out of it. And other things, if the teacher didn't come alive well, my Sandy was so great to me. And the most patient person in America. And I don't know what's wrong with her ears, that she could listen to me six hours a day. She took me through a crash course -- it was like the Berlitz blitz of violin study.
Meryl on teachers and Sandy Park, her violin coach for Music of the Heart

Not really. You can see where she'd be pulled into this.
She's very like Roberta in her background, I think [she's] from Detroit or something.
She really understands music, Madonna, she really understands its power.
I think she would have been a great Roberta.
Meryl's answer to: 'it's odd to think of Madonna and Meryl Streep doing the same role.'

I had a ball, it was a real Walter Mitty moment.
On what it was like to play Carnegie Hall

I was in a funny position, because I was acting a teacher, but I was not really a teacher, though the children assumed I was one." Though she may have defined herself as an actress playing a teacher, Streep needed to be the teacher for her students on the set (many of whom were students of the real-life teacher Guaspari). Those students, many of whom knew little of Streep’s film history or her esteemed reputation in the film industry, regarded her as a teacher, an authority, an adult who wanted their respect and attention. "Interestingly enough," Meryl points out, "I couldn’t have had their respect and their attention if I had just stepped in to take over a role someone had written for me. When I said to the children, ‘O.K., everybody look at me,’ they really had to look. They weren’t actors. This was real life, not an acting studio. The boys and girls wouldn’t look at me unless I really was somebody to them and that somebody was a teacher." Classroom management, a challenge to most teachers, was a responsibility she could not escape: There were many kids in the room, and they would get bored and they would get tired, and then they started doing things, getting rowdy, and meanwhile you have to stay up there, try to keep things going, and you know, be Robin Williams for a day. I entertained them and disciplined them and kept them in line. I went way, way beyond my job description. Meryl learned that playing a teacher involved tasks not delineated in any script or job description. Learning the script by heart and developing a proficiency with the violin would not alone suffice for this role. She discovered, as all good teachers do, that humor, determination (even stubbornness), and a willingness to give of herself were all helpful. In order for her students to play their instruments, play their parts, she needed to gain, direct, and maintain their attention. The proverbial carrot sometimes worked: "A few of the children knew me from Death Becomes Her [1992]. I think that’s probably the only movie of mine any of them had seen–my head turning around three hundred and sixty degrees, which several youngsters wanted me to do. I said, "Later, if you’re good.
Meryl discussing acting and teaching in Music of the Heart.

I have a lot of people to thank and I'm going to be one of those people who tries to mention a lot of names, because I know just two seconds ago my mother and father went bezerk and I'd like to give some other mothers and fathers that same opportunity.
After winning the Best Actress Academy Award for Sophie's Choice

Thank you. I just realized you can see ~completely~ through my dress. So now I am standing with them *together* {Laughter} *Sigh* To even me it seems like I'm never leaving this stage. . . I really just want to thank Colin (Callendar) and Cary and everybody at HBO for putting their money where their brains are. . . and to Cary Brokaw who stayed with this project for 14 years and finally saw it through so beautifully. And to my magnificent Mike Nichols in London, thank you, thank you, for casting me in this: your crowning achievement of your already astonishing career. . . and I'd like to thank Kevin Huvane, my agent, because Tim Robbins forgot to thank his agent . . . {Laughter}, so, "and. . . I'm-sure-he-thanks-his-agent-too!" {More laughter} I'd like to thank my colleague and friend of 25 years, Roy Helland, my hair and make-up man, who continues to do his best to destroy my natural good looks. . . {Laughter} I'd like to thank the beautiful cast: James Cromwell, Justin Kirk, Mary Louise Parker, Al Pacino, Ben Schenkman, ay yi de ve deh, the fabulous Emma Thompson -- wish you were here -- Patrick Wilson and Jeffrey Wright. And finally I'd like to thank the searingly gifted Tony Kushner, {Applause} whose compassion and rage and love gave birth to this angel's-eye view of what we all can be in America. And I just want to say that I don't think that the two biggest problems in America are that too many people want to commit their lives to one another "'til death do us part," and steroids in sports. I don't think those are our two biggest problems. {Applause} That's all -- thank you very much!
Meryl's Acceptance Speech (January 25, 2004)
at the Golden Globe Awards

Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.
I’d like to thank Cary, Colin and Chris, and all at HBO,
for raising the bar for humanity on what we’re allowed to show.
Uncomfortable truths, homosexual youth, middle-aged heterosexual glory,
Al Pacino’s face, Emma Thompson’s grace, Tony Kushner’s incomparable story.
For giving Mike Nichols a truckload of shekels to bring this sweet tale to the masses.
Of rose-lipped maidens and lightfoot lads and how quickly all of it passes.
If anyone’s biting his cuticles, ow. . . lest I say anything political now,
I’m only an actor, this isn’t the factor, God forbid I should seem hypercritical,
but it is a fact, I’ve been lucky to act with gratitude and joy,
in this story of love that shone down from above on the life of a dying boy.

Thank you, Tony, for writing this beautiful piece, “Angels in America.” And thank you actors, friends, many of whom I’ve worked with, all of whom I’ve very grateful for this wonderful statuette. . . and honor. Thank you very much.
Meryl's Acceptance Speech (February 22, 2004)
at the Screen Actors Guild Awards

I was born in Summit, New Jersey, in a middle-class suburb. . . and there was just this swarm of kids in the neighborhood. Everybody just goes around in a big clump, a big gang. I wore glasses from the time I was 4. I refused to wear them after 7th grade. My mother would drive to school and give them to the teacher and say "Make her wear these!!" But I didn't want to. . . because I wanted to be pretty. . . I have two brothers, who are always younger than I am, no matter what I do. I guess I was bossy, you know, I was bigger. We lived about an hour outside of New York. My mother would drive on to the ferry and go across to Manhattan. I was always interested in what it felt like to be the whole of me. I always wanted to be older than I was. I was always interested in what it felt like to be my mother, or my grandmother, or the lady up the street. I'd run for everything in my school: I'd run for Treasurer, I'd run for Vice President, I'd run for student council, and I never won anything. But when I found the peroxide bottle. . . I got homecoming queen {laughs}. I thought I wanted to be a singer or music major or something, but when I got to Vassar I realized how much math was involved, so I moved on. . . and went into the drama department. After Vassar, I went to Yale and got a scholarship. It was a very, very intense education. That's how I was trained . . . I did a lot of different things, and I'm sure that's what gave me the appetite to not bore myself by playing the same kinds of characters.
Meryl Streep in the interview segments during the AFI Tribute to Meryl Streep

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