Top 100 Midler's Quotes
#1. Any of Bette Midler's concerts should be required viewing for every actor/performer. She has the audience in the palm of her hands at all times and can switch emotions on a dime: Great singer, great actress, great comedian - fearless.
Bryan Batt
#2. Do I understand this right? I'm being marked down?
Bette Midler
#3. You foreigners," he said. "You come to China and complain about the
pollution, but I don't know why." He then gestured at the blurred
landscape around us. "To me, this place smells like money.
Paul Midler
#4. If only I'd known my differentness would be an asset, then my earlier life would have been much easier.
Bette Midler
#5. I would much rather watch myself than listen to myself. The moving is second nature, but the listening ... that's the art.
Bette Midler
#6. I read neither good nor bad about me. I let it not even in my life, so it has no effect on me. I am very sensitive.
Bette Midler
#7. Me, I'm just a hack. I'm just a schlep-per. I just do what I can do.
Bette Midler
#8. Cats always seem so very wise, when staring with their half-closed eyes. Can they be thinking, I'll be nice, and maybe she will feed me twice?
Bette Midler
#10. Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it's like a jackhammer.
Bette Midler
#11. I bear no grudges. I have a mind that retains nothing.
Bette Midler
#12. I was inspired more by early Bette Midler. I do wear a fancy dress and very high heels - and extra high hair. My goal is to obliterate all earnestness.
Ana Gasteyer
#13. I wouldn't say I invented tacky, but I definitely brought it to its present high popularity.
Bette Midler
#14. A lot of people have no access to beauty. When I was growing up, my mother had only a few pretty things to look at.
Bette Midler
#15. Education is my next big thing. When music and art were taken out of the schools, I went berserk!
Bette Midler
#16. I sometimes think I should go back to school to learn French and music, but who would have me?
Bette Midler
#17. I kind of wanted to be a waitress in New York City. I thought it was fun and glamorous in its own way. Like in the movie 'Beaches,' when Bette Midler is banging on the radiator, and it's cold, and she's poor. I kind of thought that would be fun to be, like, a poor, struggling actor.
Kether Donohue
#18. My parents taught me: Do not rely on a man. Not rely on it that you get married and it pays for you. That's what I figured. I have always paid my own bills.
Bette Midler
#20. Writing a book is not as tough as it is to haul thirty-five people around the country and sweat like a horse five nights a week.
Bette Midler
#21. The old forms of entertainment are not extinct. Live performances are the pinnacle. If you can something that people want to see live, then you have a great career.
Bette Midler
#22. When it's three o'clock in New York, it's still 1938 in London.
Bette Midler
#23. I already have a Tony for my Broadway concert in '73. It's one of the most precious things I've won.
Bette Midler
#24. China manufacturing was a game played on a field without referees.
Paul Midler
#25. I have my standards. They're low, but I have them.
Bette Midler
#26. The only thing Madonna will ever do like a virgin is give birth in a stable.
Bette Midler
#27. Honey, I can smell the scent of another woman from 500 paces.
Bette Midler
#28. Sometimes my brain goes on CD shuffle. You know, you put a bunch of CD's on and hit play and random things come out.
Bette Midler
#29. My whole life has been spent waiting for an epiphany, a manifestation of God's presence, the kind of transcendent, magical experience that let's you see your place in the big picture. And that is what I had with my first compost heap.
Bette Midler
#30. I'm so glad to be back in New York. Los Angeles can be so cold, so cruel after you've been-what's the word?-oh yes: 'fired.'
Bette Midler
#31. I believe that Judy Garland's artistry was so fine. I mean, when people say: 'oh, she brought so much of her life to her music', I don't really believe that. I believe that she didn't have to. She just was a moving human being. That was her gift.
Bette Midler
#32. Just remember, during the winter, far beneath the bitter snow, that there's a seed that with the sun's love in the spring becomes a rose.
Bette Midler
#33. It's the Point of Your View that Decides What You See - / One Man's Flop Is Another Man's Hit. / From Manners to Movies, the Picture Keeps Changing / Depending Upon Where You Sit.
Bette Midler
#34. Through books and photographs, I saw a world that was not my own - and I realized that there was another world. That's why I'm concerned about education, because it helps our children see other worlds.
Bette Midler
#35. I hope to keep entertaining in some way until I can't physically entertain any longer. It's what I was born to do, and I love this profession.
Bette Midler
#36. You have to think you're the greatest thing since sliced bread, but you have to know that you're not.
Bette Midler
#37. What I have in me ... it's not hard, and it's not cold, and it's not fierce ambition, that's not what it is. It's a drive [for success], but it's not a drive ... it's being driven, it's something I have no control over. It's something pushing me, I'm not pushing myself.
Bette Midler
#38. Make sure your life is a rare entertainment! It doesn't take anything drastic. You needn't be gorgeous or wealthy or smart, just very enthusiastic!
Bette Midler
#39. All these rumors about [Tom Cruise] being gay. I don't believe it. I don't believe it for one minute. He hasn't been to one of my shows.
Bette Midler
#40. My idea of superwoman is someone who scrubs her own floors.
Bette Midler
#41. People are not the best because they work hard. They work hard because they are the best.
Bette Midler
#42. [On Denmark:] ... that little country of cottage cheese and courage ...
Bette Midler
#43. The worst part of success is trying to find someone who is happy for you.
Bette Midler
#44. I'd make a wonderful Lady Macbeth. I'll wear a pair of platform shoes or something.
Bette Midler
#45. I had a hard-scrabble childhood with my parents. I have a lot of baggage. To come down to the footlights and accept the audience's affection inside a Broadway theater - that didn't come easily to me.
Bette Midler
#46. There was an inquiry just last week about the new Bette Midler show, and I just didn't want to do that.
Robert Urich
#47. I'd never done a straight play before, never, and it was very hard work - really, really hard work. It was dense, really wordy, and I was determined to learn every word of it - not just skip over bits and pieces.
Bette Midler
#48. Self-esteem is something you have to earn! The only way to achieve self-esteem is to work hard. People have an obligation to live up to their potential.
Bette Midler
#49. I made a pact with myself a long time ago: Never watch anything stupider than you. It's helped me a lot.
Bette Midler
#50. Group conformity scares the pants off me because it's so often a prelude to cruelty towards anyone who doesn't want to - or can't - join the Big Parade.
Bette Midler
#52. I want it all - and I would like it delivered.
Bette Midler
#53. I've always said we got married because there was nothing on TV.
Bette Midler
#54. Enough about me. What do you think about me?
Bette Midler
#55. I never know how much of what I say is true.
Bette Midler
#56. Thank God for the gays. I don't know what would have happened but I know what did happen. Good for them and good for me.
Bette Midler
#57. Melbourne is the kind of town that really makes you consider the question 'Is there life after death?
Bette Midler
#58. I tried to charm the pants off Bob Dylan, but everyone will be disappointed to learn that I was unsuccessful. I got close - a couple of fast feels in the front seat of a Cadillac.
Bette Midler
#59. Music is probably the only place I get energy from. Music and maybe watching a really tremendous performer, watching a terrific performer like Jagger or watching a great movie.
Bette Midler
#60. The inventor of the modern foundation garment that we women wear today was a German scientist and opera lover by the name of Otto Titsling.
Bette Midler
#61. I wish America would spend even half as much time complaining about plastics in our oceans as we do about actresses' plastic surgery.
Bette Midler
#62. The [film] industry is an ecosystem that's sick.
Bette Midler
#63. There's a kind of emotional exploration you plumb with a friend that you don't really do with your family.
Bette Midler
#64. I was brought up on rock-'n'-roll. It was sort of funny because I couldn't get interested in anything else - I tried and tried but I couldn't get into science ... or mathematics, I just cut myself off from anything else there was to get interested in.
Bette Midler
#65. I learned to accept the audience's happiness for me, which is one of the hardest things for me to learn.
Bette Midler
#66. Cherish forever what makes you unique, cuz you're really a yawn if it goes
Bette Midler
#67. I firmly believe that with the right footwear one can rule the world.
Bette Midler
#68. I haven't left my house in days. I watch the news channels incessantly. All the news stories are about the election; all the commercials are Viagra and Cialis.
Election, erection, election, erection!
Either way we're screwed!
Bette Midler
#69. I didn't belong as a kid, and that always bothered me. If only I'd known that one day my differentness would be an asset, then my early life would have been much easier.
Bette Midler
#70. The worst part of success is to try to find someone who is happy for you.
Bette Midler
#71. I try not to drink too much because when I'm drunk, I bite.
Bette Midler
#72. When you have a steady job you're more inspired to broaden yourself.
Bette Midler
#73. Tracy Ullman, I grew up watching her shows and standup and improv and specials. Bette Midler and Whoopi Goldberg. They inspire me to do it all. I always wanted to do it all; I never wanted to be put in a box.
Bresha Webb
#74. As an actor, you're supposed to take jobs that will challenge you or force fans to see you in a different light. By the '90s, I wasn't really an actor anymore. I was someone who went on the road with these gigantic concerts.
Bette Midler
#75. If somebody makes me laugh, I'm his slave for life.
Bette Midler
#76. If they [at the audition] don't like the way you sound they won't buy you anyway, ripped dress or no ripped dress, ass hanging out or no ass hanging out.
Bette Midler
#77. If you do a musical, it's really thrilling and it's a lot of work, but it's very rewarding. I would say, for me, what I like best is what I do, which is, I call it vaudeville, I call it live, I call it in concert, I call it what Bette Midler does, and what Garland did for years, and Ethel Merman.
Debbie Reynolds
#78. I married a German. Every night I dress up as Poland and he invades me.
Bette Midler
#79. The worst part of success is to try finding someone who is happy for you.
Bette Midler
#80. For days on end, I would hardly speak, and when I did only the vilest sort of gibberish would spout forth. I became morose and fat. Unapproachable, except when eating - and then only by waiters.
Bette Midler
#81. If you wants something done, you'd better do it yourself - or ask another woman to do it.
Bette Midler
#82. I got so far away from what they told you in acting class: Do something different. Producers kept offering me the 'Sister Act' movie, but I said, 'My fans don't want to see me in a wimple.' I literally said, 'My fans don't want to see me in a wimple.'
Bette Midler
#83. I feel like a million tonight - but one at a time.
Bette Midler
#84. It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance. It is the dream afraid of waking that never takes the chance. It is the one who won't be taken who cannot seem to give. And the soul afraid of dying that never learns to live.
Bette Midler
#85. Sometimes you have to make your own opportunities and that's why I'm on TV. I wasn't going to sit around anymore, waiting patiently for the damn phone to ring. I had to create my own place- I've always done that.
Bette Midler
#86. Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world.
Bette Midler
#87. If I don't feel right about what I'm in, I don't feel right about anything.
Bette Midler
#89. Here I am, one of the most colorful women of my time - if not of my block - being made to sound positively legumelike in printed interviews.
Bette Midler
#90. My husband calls it winging it - the way I just took what the studios gave me, didn't do my homework and avoided roles that would risk my image.
Bette Midler
#91. Men's brains are smaller than those of women so they can fit into their penises.
Bette Midler
#92. [On Princess Anne:] Such an active, outdoorsy lass. She loves nature in spite of what it did to her.
Bette Midler
#93. My parents have not insisted that we go to college, but she wanted us to learn. Teacher, librarian, secretary, nurse. All my siblings were employed. But I wanted to be the boss, an independent contractor.
Bette Midler
#94. I celebrate everyone's religious holidays. if it's good enough for the righteous, it's good enough for the self-righteous, I always say.
Bette Midler
#95. They believed that the customer's exact wishes mattered only as far as they were necessary to capture the initial order. Beyond that, they figured, what an importer didn't know couldn't hurt it.
Paul Midler
#96. Life is like cooking your masterpiece recipe. You have to get the right ingredients,have the right mixture and the right cooking time to reveal the PERFECT and DELICIOUS TASTE of your craft.
Bette Midler
#97. If it weren't for Liberace, there would be no Madonna or Lady Gaga, Elton John, Bette Midler, or Elvis because it was Liberace who helped the King glitz up his act.
Robin Leach
#98. I love nature, in spite of what it did to me.
Bette Midler
#99. The only street I like is Rue Honore de Balzac, because 'Balzac' sound so gay, and I love my gays. I might like Parisians more if they named their streets only for gay icons, like Rue Liza Minnelli or Rue Bette Midler or, my favorite, Rue McClanahan.
Joan Rivers
#100. I don't think I had the aspiration to be a star growing up. I loved Madonna and Bette Midler, and I had my karaoke machine and would sing their songs.
Mandy Moore
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
