Barbara Walters Quotes

People sinking into self-pity and depression are dreary, but they can't get out of it by themselves. So every now and then, just sit there and listen, and listen, and listen. You're paying your membership dues in the human race.

Wait for those unguarded moments. Relax the mood and, like the child dropping off to sleep, the subject often reveals his truest self.

And I really do believe that the most important thing is the way you live your life on earth. But I think it's enormously comforting to believe that you're going to see your loved ones.

There was something else that [Christopher] Reeve told me privately, off camera, and it made me grin. While he was lying in the hospital, just becoming conscious with tubes connected to all parts of his body, a doctor in a white coat came in and with a Russian accent, commanded: "Turn over!"
Are you nuts? Reeve thought.
I said: 'Turn over!'" the doctor repeated.
As Reeve was about to answer "the imbecile", he realized there was something familiar about the man in the white coat. He wasn't a doctor at all. He was Reeve's old buddy from acting school at Julliard, Robin Williams. Reeve waited for a breath, and almost choked with laughter. He realized, he told me, "If I can laugh, I can live.

The hardest thing you will ever do is trust yourself.

Mr. President, Mrs. Obama. There is a photograph of you [hugging] that went viral, became the most shared photograph in the history of Twitter. How do you keep the fire going?

Before we had airplanes and astronauts, we really thought that there was an actual place beyond the clouds, somewhere over the rainbow. There was an actual place, and we could go above the clouds and find it there.

To excel is to reach your own highest dream. But you must also help others, where and when you can, to reach theirs. Personal gain is empty if you do not feel you have positively touched another's life.

I'm a wonderful editor. That's what I do best. I know exactly what I want. If I have to decide whether to wear the red dress or the blue dress or what should I have said, I am constantly changing my mind.

I have affected the way women are regarded, and that's important to me.

New York is a galaxy of adventure at once elegant, exciting and bizarre. It's a city that moves so fast, it takes energy just to stand still.

Life sometimes brings enormous difficulties and challenges that seem just too hard to bear. But bear them you can, and bear them you will, and your life can have a purpose.

I happen to disagree with the well-entrenched theory that the art of conversation is merely the art of being a good listener. Such advice invites people to be cynical with one another and full of fake; when a conversation becomes a monologue, poked along with tiny cattle-prod questions, it isn't a conversation any more.

I don't know about you, but I can never get enough David Letterman.

Don't confuse being stimulating with being blunt.

Work harder than everybody. You're not going to get it by whining, and you're not going to get it by shouting, and you're not going to get it by quitting. You're going to get it by being there.

The news media in general are liberal. If you want to be a reporter, you are going to see poverty and misery, and you have to be involved in the human condition.

When you're interviewing someone, you're in control. When you're being interviewed, you think you're in control, but you're not.

One may walk over the highest mountain one step at a time.

I found it interesting that as people become more technically oriented all over the world, at the same time people are becoming increasingly spiritual. The success of the Da Vinci code - even though it was a great yawn - also showed people's interest in religion.

But for Muslims, everything that they don't have on earth is what they get in heaven. They can drink, they can have sex. All of the forbidden pleasures on earth, you can have in paradise.

To feel valued, to know, even if only once in a while, that you can do a job well is an absolutely marvelous feeling.

If the interview was done in the studio, Frank McGee would automatically do it. But if I went out and got it, then the interview was mine. So I was considered a pushy cookie, because I would get the interview.

Children are God's way of punishing us for having sex.

For Castro, freedom starts with education. And if literacy alone were the yardstick, Cuba would rank as one of the freest nations on Earth. The literacy rate is 96 percent.

Every genius I have met could be classified as crazy by most people. They possess the highest level of sanity that us people find difficult to understand and accept.

Celebrities used to be found in clusters, like oysters - and with much the same defensive mechanisms.

A good laugh makes any interview, or any conversation, so much better.

I think most working relationships could benefit by excluding personal matters from the office chatter.

I regret not having more children. I would have loved to have had a bigger family.

To not sing with an orchestra, to not be able to communicate through my voice, which I've done all my life, and not to be able to phrase lyrics and give people that kind of joy, I think I would be totally devastated.

Don't worry about finding your bliss right now. Not even our President knew what his bliss was, nor did I. One of these days to your own surprise, your bliss will find you. But no matter what you do, participate, be there, full force, full heart, full steam ahead.

It would be nice to feel that we are a better world, a world of more compassion and a world of more humanity, and to believe in the basic goodness of man.

The aging process seems to strike first at the mechanism which warns that we have been talking too much and the listener is growing restless. The signal isn't perfect at any age - drink, for instance, throws it right out of kilter - but it is almost non-existent in old people.

Motherhood is tough. If you just want a wonderful little creature to love, you can get a puppy.

The origin of a modern party is anthropological: humans meet and share food to lower hostility between them and indicate friendship.

This is what I tell, especially young women, fight the big fights. Don't fight the little fight ... Be the first one in, be the last one out. Do your homework, choose your battles. Don't whine, and don't be the one who complains about everything. Fight the big fight.

Large cocktail parties are an infamous technique for ridding yourself of social obligations to people you usually don't know well or like much, which is such an unpromising beginning that I've rarely known one that recovered and turned into a great party.

It's a fact that it is much more comfortable to be in the position of the person who has been offended than to be the unfortunate cause of it.

Success can make you go one of two ways. It can make you a prima donna - or it can smooth the edges, take away the insecurities, let the nice things come out.

[On being indecisive and changeable:] On my gravestone I want inscribed: 'On the other hand, maybe I should have lived.

A job is not a career. I think I started out with a job. It turned into a career and changed my life.