Whether you know her from stage, screen, talk show or Seinfeld, Bette Midler is an entertainment legend with legions of fans. She has sung about the “wind beneath” her wings for decades and has informed and shared her opinion on talk shows for years. She’s also a Broadway icon and the star of the film Beaches. What can’t Midler do?
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Well, with that in mind, we wanted to see what the now-77-year-old Hawaiian-born Grammy-Golden Globe-Emmy-and Tony-Award-winner has to say about the world around her. About her crafts, entertainment, life and love.
Below are the best 20 Bette Midler quotes.
1. “Cherish forever what makes you unique.”
2. “Education is my next big thing. When music and art were taken out of the schools, I went berserk!”
3. “I’m working my way toward divinity.”
4. “I married a German. Every night I dress up as Poland and he invades me.”
5. “My idea of superwoman is someone who scrubs her own floors.”
6. “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.”
7. “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.”
8. “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.'”
9. “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.”
10. “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.”
11. “I learned to accept the audience’s happiness for me, which is one of the hardest things for me to learn.”
12. “I never know how much of what I say is true.”
13. “The worst part of success is to try finding someone who is happy for you.”
14. “After thirty, a body has a mind of its own.”
15. “I always try to balance the light with the heavy—a few tears of human spirit in with the sequins and the fringes.”
16. “I wouldn’t say I invented tacky, but I definitely brought it to its present high popularity.”
17. “When I moved to New York City in 1965, I wanted to be in theater. I was following my Ethel Barrymore dream. But I was too young to be Ethel.”
18. “If sex is such a natural phenomenon, how come there are so many books on how to do it?”
19. “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.”
20. “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.”
Photo by Mark Sagliocco/WireImage
