Meryl Streep

What does it take to be the first female anything? It takes grit, and it takes grace.

I have a very clear understanding of what my voice is. It's like a B voice. It hovers around B-minus, B-plus. I have great friends who are wonderful singers, and I know I'll never be able to do that. But singing through a character is something I can do.

My job is usually to express emotion as freely as possible.

It is well that the earth is round that we do not see too far ahead.

I go to a lot of movies where people are all around me laughing, and I feel like I'm from outer space because I find it dangerous and stupid and horrible and degrading to women and all these things.

There are improbable things suspended in space, like the earth.

I'm all over the place.

Grace, respect, reserve, and empathetic listening are qualities sorely missing from the public discourse now.

How you first meet the public is how the industry sees you. You can't argue with them. That's their perception.

When I was a kid, when I was 16, 17, I'd come home from high school, and my dad collected all of Barbra Streisand's records. And she was very young then. I think she probably had three records out, and she was 21, and we had them all. And I knew every single song, every breath, every elision, every swell. And I sang along to it.

Everything we say signifies; everything counts, that we put out into the world. It impacts on kids, it impacts on the zeitgeist of the time.

People at agencies and studios, including the parent boards, might look around the table at the decision-making level and feel something is wrong if half their participants are not women. Because our tastes are different, what we value is different. Not better, different.