Meryl Streep Quotes

My acting coach I've got here, Richard Lawson, he's been doing good, just telling me to calm down sometimes and just be me.

If you're cast right you can actually just let yourself go because all your gestures will be right, all your intonations will be right because you just somewhere understand who this person is.

Ninety percent of the preparation we do as actors is just jive. It doesn't do anything.

As always, with acting, you can't be too self-conscious. You shouldn't care about what people are thinking about you at the time because they're not caring about you, they're caring about the character.

I've always considered myself an actor first and foremost.

So many actors get caught up in their technique, and to be honest, I see it really getting in the way. I see them forcing things. I definitely do my best work when I'm free of that. But I think as an actor, I work really hard in preparing the roles.

Actors put ourselves in awkward positions all the time.

It's good for actors to confront those things we have to act: panic, pain and death.

It's not a pleasure torturing actors, although some of them enjoy it.

I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That's the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.

I don't bring my life into a character at all.

I definitely think it exercises an interesting muscle, auditioning for bad parts and trying to figure out how to make it real. I don't know what I'm talking about now.

As much as I can act, I don't have anything in me that yearns to be an actor - that sense of needing to be onstage, in costume, in character; that is utterly not interesting to me.

I think acting can be very frustrating, and there's no experience that doesn't make you a better actor.

No, I'm not a very methodologically pure actor.

I've never so appreciated what actors do and how strange it is.

Most of my training at graduate school was geared towards drama, so I feel good about it, and I can do it, but it requires a lot more work from me. I feel like with drama... well, with all acting, really, you need to honor the truth of the situation.

Some actors need to be rattled and some need to be focused.

You can't just tell actors, especially young ones, to 'act happy' and expect them to do it. They must in some essential way be happy.

I feel like my responsibility as an actor is to make characters as compelling and believable as possible.

I found acting tough; it takes a lot out of you if you have no technique.

Only a great actor finds the difficulties of the actor's art infinite.

It sounds maybe a little old fashioned, but the parts I want to play and I do play, you don't want to inject too much of your own personality. What you sacrifice then is a slight mystery.

I suppose I could be accused of taking acting too seriously and losing the fun of it. I do take my work very seriously; I take on the responsibility of it.

I have to believe in the character to perform it.