Meryl Streep

“I just saw ‘Death of a Salesman’ last night. I can’t believe Laurie Metcalf just blew my mind... all of them! And I thought, ‘I better just retire, because I don’t know how the fuck she did that.’ What an artist.”

“I go into everything, not knowing how people do it. And you sort of feel and listen and pick it up as you go along. But I don’t have a method — when you say ‘Oh, you went method,’ I don’t even know what ‘the method’ is. I never studied it.”

“I think we tend to Marvel-ize the movies now. We got the villains and we got the good guys, and it’s so boring,”

“We should not be surprised that these profound changes come at a steeper cost than we originally thought. We should not be surprised that not everyone is actually cool with it.”

“I feel so lucky to be able to come back to something we did 20 years ago. Who gets to do that? We've had a whole lifetime. Look at Stanley Tucci! He's blossomed! [Emily Blunt] blossomed at birth.”

“It’s cross culture. We’ve just been around the world with this. The reaction is the same in Mexico City as Tokyo, as Seoul, as Shanghai... I honestly was surprised. I really was surprised by the universality of the response and from so many different kinds of people.”

“It makes me so happy! Would we have fashion without gay people?”

“It’s compensatory. The advancements of women in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of this one have been destabilizing. It’s as if women have to say, 'I’m little. I can’t walk in these shoes. I can’t run. I’m bare, not threatening,'”

“I think the most… powerful message that our current first lady sent was in the coat that said ‘I Really Don’t Care, Do U?’ when she was going to see migrant children who were incarcerated,”

“History is shaped not only by those who make it, but by those who ensure it is remembered. I am proud to continue supporting this essential work so that future generations inherit a history that is both truthful and complete,”

“The demand that grew during those years for pesticide-free and sustainably grown food gave farmers confidence there would be a market for organics, and they undertook the cost of transitioning their fields to sustainable practice.”

“Once you know how to search out and credit the facts around certain problems, you are called on by your conscience to act on them. The Vassar conscience rings a bell in your head; it’s a call to action in your heart.”

“She was a mentor because she said to me, 'Meryl, you're capable. You're so great.' She was saying, 'You can do whatever you put your mind to. If you're lazy, you're not going to get it done. But if you put your mind to it, you can do anything.' And I believed her.”

“Go to the [Vassar] Farm. Walk through the gate and into the 500 red, green, and golden acres of inspiration of the Ecological Preserve. Breathe in courage, exhale resolve. And know that every action you take—or don’t take—matters.”

“Mothers and Others, in the 10 years that it operated, grew from 20 of my neighbors to a membership of 35,000 informed consumers,”

“One value of a Vassar education is that it kind of dooms you to a life of awareness …”

“So yeah, I don’t know how to do it,”

“Basically I don’t know how to act... When I see people do it, I think, ‘How did she do that?’”

“I think when we tend to Marvel-ize the movies now – we got the villains and we got the good guys – and it’s so boring.”

“And we’ve been through some rough times together and some great times, and I love you deeply.”

“world’s biggest whiner, which Disney can attest to.”

“Stanley has an elegance to his heterosexuality — his undeniable heterosexuality — which is formidable,”

“I’ve adored working with Stanley, and I’ve done it often, and I’m ready to go again,”

“I knew it was going to be a hit and I wanted to see if I doubled my ask...”

“I was ready to retire, but that was a lesson,”

“They made an offer, and I said, No, not going to do it,”

“You remember stuff like that when you're young, those cutting things.”

“They called me up and they made an offer, and I said, 'No, not going to do it,'”

“My father started taking me to college interviews when I was 15,”

“And so it was fun to come back and revisit these characters confronting that new reality.”

“There were so many young women who...had said, you know, 'The first movie made me want to be a journalist, made me want to dress up, made me want to have fun.'”

“All dress is about expressing yourself, but we’re also subject to larger historical and political sweeps of expectation,”

“I think the most powerful message that our current first lady sent was in the coat that said 'I Really Don’t Care, Do U?' when she was going to see migrant children who were incarcerated.”

“All dress is about expressing yourself, but we’re also subject to larger historical and political sweeps of expectation.”

“I was interested in the business part of it, that thing of carrying the weight of many, many people’s jobs, running a big organization, keeping it going somehow,”

“Someone broke into my house, ripped up the pictures of my children on my desk [and] I got it, the anger and despair.”

“Since my kids at the time were basically mainlining apple juice and applesauce, and I was fairly celebrated for my pies, this did alarm me,”

“I read the accounts of lost livelihoods with real regret and sadness,”

“I grew up with Meryl Streep, and she was the greatest actress that my whole generation of women aspires to be,”