My advice: Don't waste so much time worrying about your skin or your weight. Develop what you do, what you put your hands on in the world.
Meryl StreepRead
I say to myself, 'I don't know how to act - and why does anybody want to look at me on-screen anymore?' ... Lots of actors feel that way. What gives you strength is also your weakness - your raging insecurity.
Interpretation
Insecurity can drive creativity, but it can also be a source of doubt.
Meryl Streep's quote reflects the duality of an actor's experience, highlighting how insecurity can be both a motivating force and a crippling weakness. She acknowledges that many actors share this feeling of uncertainty about their talents and appeal, suggesting that the very traits that fuel their passion may also hinder their confidence.
In practice
During an acting workshop while discussing performance anxieties.
My advice: Don't waste so much time worrying about your skin or your weight. Develop what you do, what you put your hands on in the world.
Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.
I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me.
I believe in a world of opposites and that’s why I avoid people with rigid and inflexible personalities.
Service is the only thing that's important about love. Everybody is worried about 'losing yourself' - all this narcissism. Duty. We can't stand that idea now either... But duty might be a suit of armor you put on to fight for your love.
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.
Inevitably, every part an actor plays contains some of himself.
I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.
Everything that I had done creatively related to two or three incidents that happened to me when I was a child that I'd forgotten. Everything, absolutely everything.
The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.
Queen and huntress, chaste and fair Now the sun is laid to sleep, Seated in thy silver chair, State in wonted manner keep: Hesperus entreats thy light Goddess, excellently bright.
If you shoot with a billion cameras, then there's no perspective. You want to use one shot at a time, so it's better to discover what that is before you shoot, rather than trying to make something in the cutting room, and then it just becomes generic.
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