Meryl Streep

I have always regarded myself as the pillar of my life.

If you have been touched by the success fairy, people think you know why. People think success breeds enlightenment and you are duty-bound to spread around like manure. Fertilize those young minds!

My success has depended wholly on putting things over on people, so I'm not sure that I'm that great a role model. I am, however, an expert on pretending to be an expert on pretending to be an expert.

One is obliged to do a great deal of kissing in my line of work: air kissing, [butt] kissing, kissing up, and of course actual kissing. Much like hookers, actors have to do it with people we may not like or even know.

Women are better at acting then men. Why? Because we have to be. If successfully convincing someone bigger than you are of something he doesn't want to know is a survival skill, this is how women have survived through the millennia.

Pretending is not just play. Pretending is imagined possibility. Pretending, or acting, is a very valuable life skill and we do it all the time.

We change who we are to fit the exogenous of our time, and not just strategically or to our own advantage, sometimes sympathetically without our even knowing it for the betterment of the whole group.

Empathy is at the heart of the actor's art.

This is your time and it feels normal to you, but really, there is no normal. There's only change and resistance to it and then more change.

While I am overwhelmingly proud of work that I, believe me, did not do on my own, I can assure you that awards have very little bearing on my own personal happiness, my own sense of well-being and purpose in the world.

Being a celebrity has taught me to hide, but being an actor has opened my soul.

You don't have to be famous. You just have to make your mother and father proud of you.

Instant gratification is not soon enough.

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.