Time & Perspective Quote by Barbra Streisand

Dismissive on its face, Streisand's line is really a fight over who gets to write the script. "Myths" here aren't charming legends; they're the glossy stories culture tells to keep power arrangements looking natural: the myth of the ingenue who should stay grateful, the myth of the "difficult woman" who should be punished for wanting control, the myth that taste-makers are neutral. As an actress who became a producer-director at a time when Hollywood policed women's ambition, Streisand isn't rejecting imagination so much as calling out narrative as a tool of social inertia.

The intent is blunt: stop romanticizing the past and stop treating inherited stories as instructions. "Waste of time" is provocatively unartistic phrasing from an artist, which is the point. It yanks myth down from the pedestal and frames it as an obstacle course designed by someone else. The subtext reads like a career-long protest against the way celebrity mythmaking flattens real work: the diva myth, the genius myth, the redemption arc that never quite fits. Streisand has lived inside a machinery that manufactures myths for profit, then sells them back as identity.

Context matters, too. Coming of age in an industry that rewarded conformity and punished refusal, she built a brand on insisting that talent doesn't have to be palatable. In that light, "progression" isn't abstract enlightenment; it's practical movement: better roles, broader representation, more control over one's own narrative. The line works because it refuses nostalgia's comfort and makes "story" answerable to consequences.