Barbra Streisand Quotes

. . . it is true, even people with painful childhoods. . . grow up to be more interesting people. So, there's always a positive to a negative.

In the music business, we all do different things, but we sit there and admire other people who can write a song differently or sing differently. It's not so competitive.

I’d rather not talk about money. It’s kind of gross.

I must have got my detailed, obsessive streak from my father, who was an English teacher, because my mother wasn't like me at all.

I knew that with a mouth like mine, I just hadda be a star or something.

A large part of me is pure nebbish - plain, dull, uninteresting. There's a more flamboyant part, too. Obviously.

Why does a woman work ten years to change a man's habits and then complain that he's not the man she married?

When I was a teenager in New York, I was buying antique clothes. I still am.

I just became a singer, because I could never get work as an actress.

They're called 'angels' because they're in heaven until the reviews come out.

I got sent to a health camp when I was about 6 years old, and we all had to wear the same starchy blue uniform. The lady who took care of me after school knit me a burgundy sweater. It was the only thing that gave me any individuality.

If a man wants to get it right, he's looked up to and respected. If a woman wants to get it right, she's difficult or impossible. If he acts, produces and directs, he's called multitalented. If she does the same thing, she's called vain and egotistical.

I don't feel like a legend. I feel like a work in progress.

Why is it men are permitted to be obsessed about their work, but women are only permitted to be obsessed about men?

If I hear a record once, I usually never listen to it again. I rarely listen to music - unless it's Billie Holiday.

When they tried me out as a host on TV, I found that I just couldn't be that gregarious person. I was stranger than that.

Success to me is having ten honeydew melons and eating only the top half of each slice.

New York critics - I hear when one of them watched "A Star Is Born", he talked back to the screen.

You don't ask a man, 'Do you want to be in control [of your job]?' You assume he wants control. Why would a woman be any different?

I don't like talking about myself and I don't like talking about the work.

It's not a date. We're just agreeing to eat at the same table.

My mother never really thought I could become anything.

When I was working a lot, I felt guilty as a parent. I couldn't pick up my son every day from school, bake him cookies and that kind of thing.

I wasn't supported, I wasn't given any self-esteem.

Men are allowed to have passion and commitment for their work... a woman is allowed that feeling for a man, but not her work.

Art is the signature of a generation; artists have a way of defining the times.

I find George Bush and Dick Cheney frightening, Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft frightening.

Performing, for me, has always been a very inner process.

You have got to discover you, what you do, and trust it.

I worked in a Chinese restaurant.

I was a personality before I became a person - I am simple, complex, generous, selfish, unattractive, beautiful, lazy and driven.

I have one son. Of everything I've done in my life, nothing matches the feeling of having life growing inside you.

I think, is wonderful about growing older, is appreciation for the miracle of existence, of life. I thank God every day. I also do believe that belief and imagination manifests reality. And therefore, even though it took twenty-five years, I did find the house, eventually, and the man I could live with.

I can take any truth; just don't lie to me.

I've considered having my nose fixed. But I didn't trust anyone enough. If I could do it myself with a mirror.

It's very often the artist who gives a voice to the voiceless by speaking up when no one else will.

Art does not exist only to entertain, but also to challenge one to think, to provoke, even to disturb, in a constant search for truth.

I love things that are indescribable, like the taste of an avocado or the smell of a gardenia.

Being a woman in music was fine, but when I wanted to direct, I was poking my head into a man's world.

I'm a terrible lip-syncer anyway because I have to be in the moment, and I can't lip-sync to something I recorded three months before.

progress, whatever your definition of it, is not inevitable.

I never sing in the shower either.

The audience is the best judge of anything. They cannot be lied to. Truth brings them closer. A moment that lags - they're gonna cough.

I like simple things. Elastic waists, so I can eat.

Thank God there were a couple of people in my life who said, "Go on, go on - you can do it!

What is dangerous about the far right is not that it takes religion seriously - most of us do - but rather that it condemns all other spiritual choices - the Buddhist, the Jew, the Muslim, and many others who consider themselves to be good Christians. The wall of separation between church and state is needed precisely because religion, like art, is too important a part of the human experience to be choked by the hands of censors.

Sometimes, when you work with mediocre talents, they feel entitled. They act like stars. Genuinely talented people don't.

Issues of foreign policy have a place in every election for President.