Barbra Streisand Quotes

I am born and raised in the Bronx. Where I grew up, it is a really working-class neighborhood and it does give you a really good work ethic.

Starting in my teens, I was always standing on the corner near our apartment singing harmony with friends. We'd also go to the park and sing under the bridge near the lake for the echo. When it was cold out, we'd stand in the little heated lobby in the project's administration building, where my mom paid the rent each month.

When I was younger I was really shy, but I'd always be singing, driving my family crazy. Apparently I was even singing when I was in the cot. That probably didn't sound too good!

My father was gone when I was three years old.

My father, my Mormon father, took off when I was a young man and, or actually very young, I was like six years old, so a young boy.

My dad was an only child. His father raised him all but alone after his mother abandoned the two of them. He was only three years old.

My pops passed when I was little. I didn't have a dad around to tell me certain things. I didn't have my biological mother.

'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing way of American life, and to my own particular child - and girlhood in upstate New York. Everyone in the novel is enormously close to me, including Marianne's cat, Muffin, who was in fact my own cat.

My dad left when I was 3 1/2, and he left my mom and I.

Not having a father always made you feel that perhaps you weren't quite the same as other people. You felt you weren't complete.

I grew up in a town without fathers.

Well I am from Annapolis Maryland. I went to High school in Baltimore, but I grew up in Annapolis. It was a cute town. We lived on a waterfront community. It was good, even though I don't really fit the preppy boater kind of style.

I look at old photos of me, and I don't feel connected to them at all. I would never wish my upbringing on anyone... but I wouldn't take it back for the world.

When I watch 'Glee', it reminds me of my upbringing.

Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, north Beverly. It was cool, everybody's cool on the block.

But, when I was about thirteen, I began to sort of sing in my neighborhood.

The real Liberace - and I'll preface this by saying that I didn't know the real one - was a man who didn't come from much. His father left him and his family for another woman. His father was a musician, which I thought was pretty interesting.

I went to elementary school in L.A. I was born in L.A. My mother was from Redondo Beach. My father was French. He died six months before I was born, so my mother went home. I was born there. Not the childhood that most people think. Middle-class, raised by my mother. Single mom.

I guess the most seminal moment going early way back was my father died when I was 3 years old. I was raised by my grandparents, and my mother went back and got a degree.

My parents divorced when I was 3 years old. They had a lounge act in Las Vegas, where I was born. The band broke up and the marriage dissolved, and my mother, my sister and I moved to Southern California. And I didn't see my dad a lot growing up; he was on the road a lot. I'd see him every couple years.

Never had I had so many friends and so much fun as I did in the projects.

My parents divorced when I was seven. Because divorce is messy, for good or ill, they sent me to boarding school.

My mom, you know, took off when I was about 6. What ended up happening is I ended up being with my grandparents.

I am proud of where I come from and never forget the people I grew up with. Wherever I go, La Castellane is where I want to go back to.