Sandra Bernhard Quotations

I'm trying to appeal to the disenfranchised everybody, not just specifically gay.

I can't tell you 100 percent what makes a relationship work. But I can see something good coming and I can see something bad coming.

That disturbs people when they know they didn't have the guts or integrity to stick to their dreams.

I'm very much a humanist. I'm very much pro-choice. I'm very much politically correct.

I've become this sort of icon for the gay community. I don't like the position.

There are so few women in general who aren't completely threatened and confused by other women's success. It's very disappointing.

Everybody has their own way of tapping into their realness.

The real terrorist threats are George W. Bush and his band of brown-shirted thugs.

At some point, the pride has to be a part of the whole day-to-day oeuvre. It's part of who you are and doesn't need to be discussed anymore.

Anything that has cynicism to it and that's jaded is smutty.

I really have a problem with any kind of drug, I always have.

I think I've drawn from some of the most feminine women, like Jackie Kennedy. I am totally devastated that she's gone. She had it all.

I'm sure that Jesus was an incredible person.

Smut, if it's really smut, there's nothing backing it up. It's the easy way out.

Unfortunately, most college kids these days aren't coming from any place-they seem to ask the same kind of questions over and over again.

When you're watching the news, how many days in a row can you watch that and feel good about yourself and the world?

There are few performers who would have had the audacity to even bring up the fact that they had been poorly reviewed.

I really, really love Hilary Clinton. I think she's very cool. She's out there and she's involved.

I'm very much an optimist. I don't think I could do my work if I didn't believe there was some kind of hope for humanity.

I don't consider myself a comic but a performer. A comic tells bad jokes.

I don't like surgery. I don't like elective surgery, I don't like surgery that you have to have.

I'm studying Kabbalah, which is really the essence of Jewish spirituality.

When people pay to see you live, they connect with you on a much deeper level than people who just buy your records.

I think everybody is covering their posteriors with the Enron scandal and it was very convenient that Sept. 11 came along to deflect the fact that they should never have been in the White House in the first place. What happened in the election was completely corrupt.

If you close your eyes, you could just as well imagine me to be vintage Ali MacGraw, circa 1968.

I would never wanna do a show that's strictly maudlin and invaded my personal life and my home. I would never do that.

You don't need to be famous to live a life as an artist.

I've always allowed myself to go on journeys creatively and emotionally, and never put, like, limits on myself.

I was looking for something within Judaism that had a spiritual nature and not just a religious nature. So my trainer at the time was the one who took me to the Kabbalah center on my 40th birthday. I was like, "Oh, this is so cool." I was just ready for it. I was ready for something different.

I was really going through a transition in my life. I was tired of feeling victimized by my career.

From the time I was a kid, I'd never joined groups. I hated high school groups. I hung out with hippies, musical people. I hung out with whomever I found compelling and interesting and smart. And I continued to do that throughout my life.

I'm a sexual person. A lot of different people turn me on and have over the years, and I've always wanted to make it very clear that this was not coming from some sort of antimale point of view.

When I was really little, I was skinny and people laughed at me for being skinny, so, we all pay our dues for the bodies we're in one way or another. But thank god I haven't needed to alter it to feel good about myself.

The most important, overriding arc of my career has been that I would never be self-deprecating.

I really thought I wanted to be a musical-comedy star, but I lived in Phoenix and didn't want to go all the way to New York and be that far away from home. So I thought maybe I'd be a rock 'n' roll singer or an opera singer.

I feel like you've gotta be able to get up every night in front of a live audience. Whether it's 10 people or 50 people or a hundred people, whether you're in a rock band or doing the comedy circuit.

I'm somebody who can absorb a lot.

Onstage, I'm still wearing my fabulous, sheer dresses because I'm not that big.

I don't think somebody can just, like, wave a magic wand and make you a star.

It's up to couples, to individuals, to have a trust between each other.

It's nobody's business how you do something.

I'm the only actress in Hollywood who didn't pay to have these lips.

I try to avoid people's eyes because I don't like to get that intimate with just anybody. i don't need the responsibility.

Purim, one of my favorite holidays. It's like the original drag queen's holiday. It's when all the Jewish men go for it and feel no guilt for a change.

You have to take the basics of feminism and the kind of outline of it and do what you do with it. You have to make things work for your own life.

Things are so scary and intimidating with AIDS and the right wing that people are looking for somebody to just give them safe harbors.

They want families to come to New York and go to the theater, so the theater is all geared toward family entertainment. It's money, you know.

I think so much of what informs us as performers is what we had to endure as kids growing up. I was the youngest in my family. I always got a lot of attention.

There will come a day when Anne Heche will be straight again.

The fumes are killing us, and we wonder why things are going haywire.

There's this whole sense of judgment and who's right and who's wrong and who's moral and who's going to be punished.

I love performing. I love being a provocateur. I love putting myself in situations that are uncomfortable and that I have to get out of.

When you have a knowledge of history, it's very soothing. When there's continuity in your life, it's soothing.

You reach a certain point in your 30s when you say things in a much safer way.

Morality is standing by your friends, standing by people when it's not popular. It's sacrificing things on a big international stage, and sometimes it's sacrificing your basic comforts.

I like the energy of live performance.

Maybe I'd be in a different place in my career if I'd had that 10-year plan, a lot of people went at it with this voracity that I never had. My only voracity was to have fun and to be in the mix.

I've always loved being at the eye of the storm creatively with people that I find exciting and glamorous. So sometimes I got sidetracked in my career and maybe I would have done more TV or film.

... coming to a place like Nashville, which is just music music music, it's always been such an influence on me. And there are so many interesting songwriters out there, and it's such a crazy business and so many people are trying to do it, and it's all right there in Nashville.

A remembrance can mean nothing to the one remembered; it can only remind the ones left behind how little they did while you were still alive.

I think Bush is amateurish and self-serving, and frankly, it's disgusting.

When you're collaborating with somebody who's got a lot of stuff they haven't worked out yet, you're working out their vision as well.

Once you're heterosexual and comfortable with that, you don't need to take out an announcement every day.

New York has always been a sense of eclectic kind of freedom and expression on a lot of different levels.

Kids need to be educated about sex and sexuality and if they're going to have sex, learn how to protect themselves and not get pregnant.

I always have kind of underneath feeling of peace of mind that I get from just the basic tenants of spirituality.

I think people are a little bit intimidated by me. You know, I'm not exactly a wilting flower, so I think they're a little bit scared of me sometimes.

I don't want someone coming in and passing judgment on my life.

I didn't belong when I was in high school. Now people are trying to buy lips.

Random things make me laugh.

I am always hoping to do another CD. This atmosphere has been difficult.

My family wasn't the Brady Bunch. They were the Broody Bunch.

I tend to go against the grain because when I start to see that everybody's trying to shock, I try not to. I just do stuff that's subtler, more emotional, and I think that shocks people.

Be who you are and I'll be who I am. I refuse to take sides, because everybody has their story.

Growing up in the '60s and the '70s, things certainly seemed more simplistic and easier to digest.

Gay pride's beautiful. If somebody needs to be expressing that, then it's a positive thing.

For most of my relationships, I would have liaisons, and I would feel guilty.

Not everybody is cookie-cutter. You just can't be. There are too many variables in life.

I hate to judge everybody across the board.

I would be dishonorable in a relationship because I wasn't getting what I wanted from that person.

It's usually a spiritual thing that's preventing somebody from having happiness.

I think there are always different times in your life when you go, "Oh, god. I wish I were traditionally pretty. My life would be so much easier." But then you get through that, and you go, "Well, I'm not."

In the late '60s and '70s, when feminism was on the up sweep, there was an awareness of things that we're losing again.

If you want to dig, if you want to pry, do it on your time, but I'm going to be a woman of dignity.

If you come home to a household of chaos and anger and fear, you're not going to feel protected from the world.

If I've learned anything in my 30s, it's about holding back a little bit.

I've always gotten myself overly involved in supporting other women who've not always been as supportive in return.

At no time do I come from a cynical point of view. I'm coming from a concerned point of view.

I think everybody is covering their [posteriors] with the Enron scandal and it was very convenient that Sept. 11 came along to deflect the fact that they should never have been in the White House in the first place. What happened in the election was completely corrupt.

I'm not saying I'm some high priestess. I do things, I'm sure, that are damaging, but it's certainly not on purpose.

I am still comfortable with my body, because I'm like, What's not to be comfortable with? I mean, it's just my nature.

I'll take on somebody if they're offending the entire culture, not just offending me.

The live show is different from the album. It's different every night depending on where I am and how many months have gone by since I last performed.

I certainly wish Gov. Palin no harm. I'd just like her to explain to me how she can hold such outrageous views...and then go back to Alaska.

Lots of people think that bisexual means cowardly lesbian.

I don't like going back and listening to myself. It makes me uncomfortable, and I know I can never emulate what I did that night, so why listen to it?

Barbara Bush has her finger on the pulse of America. Im so glad shes back and more compassionate than ever, ... Thats right, of course people just sat around New Orleans, boring, uninspired, soulless New Orleans, and dreamed of someday relocating to the Astrodome. Oh, dear Lord, if only I could leave my unhappy existence and head on up to wonderful Houston and live with my friends side by side in a spacious football stadium, my life would be so much richer and complete.

It's depressing sitting at a comedy club all night, waiting to get on to do your five or ten minutes of material.

On one side you have book burners, Congressional wives and Pat Robertson. On the other side, you have vulgar comedians, foul-mouthed rap groups and Dennis Hopper—all your choices should be so easy.

You can't just try to be a performer. It's in your DNA. I really believe that it's either what you are or it's not at all.