Top 174 Quotes & Sayings by Barbra Streisand

Why am I so famous? What am I doing right? What are the others doing wrong?

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

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

I arrived in Hollywood without having my nose fixed, my teeth capped, or my name changed. That is very gratifying to me.

When I was maybe 5 or 6 years old, the neighborhood girls would sit on the stoop and sing. I was known as the kid who had a good voice and no father.

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

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

How I wish we lived in a time when laws were not necessary to safeguard us from discrimination.

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

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 go by instinct - I don't worry about experience.

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

I was kind of a wild child. I wasn't taught the niceties of life.

I'm not that ambitious any more. I just like my privacy. I wish I really wasn't talked about at all.

Sometimes you resent the people you love and need the most. Love is so fascinating in all its forms, and I think everyone who has ever been a mother will relate to this.

I don't care what you say about me. Just be sure to spell my name wrong.

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.

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

What does it mean when people applaud? Should I give 'em money? Say thank you? Lift my dress? The lack of applause - that I can respond to.

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.

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

Myths are a waste of time. They prevent progression.

There is nothing more important in life than love.

I've been called many names like perfectionist, difficult and obsessive. I think it takes obsession, takes searching for the details for any artist to be good.

Doubt can motivate you, so don't be afraid of it. Confidence and doubt are at two ends of the scale, and you need both. They balance each other out.

My nose was part of my heritage, and if I had talent to sing and to act, why wasn't that enough?

To have ego means to believe in your own strength. And to also be open to other people's views. It is to be open, not closed. So, yes, my ego is big, but it's also very small in some areas. My ego is responsible for my doing what I do - bad or good.

When I sing, people shut up.

Most awards, you know, they don't give you unless you go and get them - did you know that? Terribly discouraging.

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

I was raised on the streets, in hot, steamy Brooklyn, with stifled air.

Nobody on this earth has the right to tell anyone that their love for another human being is morally wrong.

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

Directing is so interesting. You know, it just sort of encompasses everything that you see, that you know, that you've felt, that you have observed.

My biggest nightmare is I'm driving home and get sick and go to hospital. I say: 'Please help me.' And the people say: 'Hey, you look like...' And I'm dying while they're wondering whether I'm Barbra Streisand.

I guess if you have an original take on life, or something about you is original, you don't have to study people who came before you. You don't have to mimic anybody. You just have a gut feeling inside, an instinct that tells you what's right for you, and you can't do it in any other way.

Oh God, don't envy me, I have my own pains.

I remember when I was 5 living on Pulaski Street in Brooklyn, the hallway of our building had a brass banister and a great sound, a great echo system. I used to sing in the hallway.

Just like my father, I've always loved education. In school I was a member of the honor society.

I'm tired of malicious articles slandering me.

I'd started going to acting classes at 14, played 'Medea' at 15 and really wanted to be a classical actress.

Marlon Brando. The finest actor who ever lived. He was my idol when I was 13. He's done enough work to last two lifetimes. Everything I do, I think: Can Brando play this with me?

There's a part of you that always remains a child, no matter how mature you get, how sophisticated or weary.

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

A man who graduated high in his class at Yale Law School and made partnership in a top law firm would be celebrated. A man who invested wisely would be admired, but a woman who accomplishes this is treated with suspicion.

I wish I could be like Shaw who once read a bad review of one of his plays, called the critic and said: 'I have your review in front of me and soon it will be behind me.'

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

We have a president who stole the presidency through family ties, arrogance and intimidation, employing Republican operatives to exercise the tactics of voter fraud by disenfranchising thousands of blacks, elderly Jews and other minorities.

I think of myself as a girl from Brooklyn.

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

I love road trips! My husband and I love that. We bought a truck with a bench seat so we could put the dog in the middle.

The audience is the barometer of the truth.

It is every woman's dream to be some man's dream woman.

Around people I don't know, I'm totally at a loss.

I am simple, complex, generous, selfish, unattractive, beautiful, lazy, and driven.

What is exciting is not for one person to be stronger than the other... but for two people to have met their match and yet they are equally as stubborn, as obstinate, as passionate, as crazy as the other.

I hated singing. I wanted to be an actress. But I don't think I'd have made it any other way.

I don't enjoy public performances and being up on a stage. I don't enjoy the glamour. Like tonight, I am up on stage and my feet hurt.

I just don't want to be hampered by my own limitations.