Meryl Streep Quotes

I try to hop into a new personality as often as I can.

I credit literature for the reason I act because that was the door to me saying, ‘Oh! I can be somebody else. I can exist as someone else.’

People can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different.

One of the best ways to change is to act as if you are the person you want to become. When you behave as if you are a different person, you change on a very basic level - even your physiology changes. When actors and actresses perform, their body chemistry is altered by the roles they play.

The first time I made myself up, I was looking at my reflection in the mirror and it wasn't me looking back. It allowed me to do things I couldn't do as myself. I found out how powerful that was and how much that can mean to an actor.

I mean I tried to transform myself through characters throughout my career.

I feel like when I'm on stage, when I'm writing songs, singing songs, I'm in the studio, I'm shooting videos, I kind of get to become this character, and I can make that whatever I want to make that.

In college, that was when I felt that acting is the one I really wanted because I got to be my true self; this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.

I've done teaching and things like that because if you're acting, you're becoming other human beings, and you need to have time to find who you are as well.

I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.

I don't know if I've ever played a character who's close to me. There have been some elements of myself in different roles. Sometimes, I show one side of myself and then completely conceal the other.

I want to keep an element of myself in every character I play. And maybe that's connected to finding something that you like in every character. Maybe they coincide.

With acting, you have to become someone else. That's the fun part of it for me - to step outside of yourself and become a character. I guess being Jimmy Cliff is a little bit of a character, too.

I think it's so important when you're playing a character that you can't judge the person you're playing at all. It's a judgment-free zone. You have to just go for it.

It's just weird because videos games let you be something that you're not; so does acting, but it puts you in, like, a real-situation-type thing or something totally different.

Acting is what I do with who I am.

It's really fun to put yourself into a character - into shoes you wouldn't normally be in.

I always do what the character demands, and I love to experiment with my looks.

My experience has offered me the sensibility that encourages me to try newer characters.

It's hard to say what you learn acting a part. You find bits and pieces of yourself that are inside the character you play. You locate the relatable aspects of that character to your own life. So, in a way, every part you play forces you to discover things about yourself you might not have learned otherwise.

Gaga and Stefani are my nicknames. I guess when people meet me for the first time and call me Stefani, it bothers me. Because it's something that's reserved for only the people who are closest to me. It's not because I don't like my given name; it's that I became somebody else. I became somebody else for a reason, you know. This is part of what my message is - you can become whoever you want to be, to escape your past.

What I didn't realize about television was that's true of acting, as well. You have that space of time to develop who you are, and you can use more and more of yourself. The lines between that character that I'm playing and myself become more and more blurred and, after awhile, they just disappear, altogether.

I am not just my hair; I proved to myself that I am a cast of characters. I'm feeling freer to venture out of the 'look' people know me for.

people in great trouble don't change to other people. They only change to themselves.

I became an actor to escape my own personality. Acting is the most therapeutic thing in the world. You see, through acting you come full circle in your personality and, oh, what a grand time you can have along the way being wonderful people through your characters...I think all the courage that I may lack personally I have as an actor.