Melissa Manchester Quotes

If I walk away from music, I walk away from myself.

Music, even if I ended up doing something different or do end up doing something different in the long run, it's just something that is life blood. If I'm not participating in some way, I feel like I'm wasting my time.

I went through a struggle, and I really needed to get myself together and connect with my purpose, which is music.

Music was always ever present when I was growing up, and it's continued to be the most important and intrinsic part of me. It kept me from going off the rails as a kid, and it gave me rare purpose and self-confidence that I couldn't find from anything else.

When I started making music, I was like, 'This is something I can believe I was meant to do.'

It took me a long time to find out that I was born to be an actor. It was the last thing on my list, although my list was very small. I didn't know what to do. But kids weren't supposed to know what to do back then; we were all cute and we'd find out what we'd do later in life.

I didn't have any knowledge of the music industry when I first got to L.A., and I really didn't know on a creative level what I wanted to sound like, so I had to do a lot of experimenting. It led to a spiral of depression and being broke.

I thought I'd use music to confront the problems that I faced, and it helped. I found a more healing mindset, and it did rejuvenate me.

When you grow up in the music industry, trying to be Britney Spears because that's what sells records and then you realize, 'All I have to do is be myself? I should have thought of that a long time ago,' it feels good to have success come from what's actually inside of you.

When I moved to New York at 22, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I took an improv class, and the first scene I did, I felt like 'I want to do this for the rest of my life.' It was the first time I ever felt like that about anything. I tried to make a living off improv.

I've managed to dodge the curse. Not all my family have. Of course, music helped me - music is all about civilization, about something worthwhile. It's all about ideas.

Acting is not my primary drive in life, although I'd be a very unhealthy person without it.

When I started doing music, it was out of despair and boredom. I got passionate about it, and I felt that it allowed me to become somebody: an artist who explores her different identities.

As an artist, what I'm looking for isn't the answers but the questions. Art saved my life, and I'm sure that it could save the lives of many people. If it's not art, find your place. But never give up.

It's amazing that even though I've lost everything else, I still have wrestling.

I'm hungry for purpose. I'm looking for still that reason that I bought a guitar and started a band, to fulfill a purpose, to manifest destiny as to who I am and why I am the way I am, and what I do. I think it's still about the music, the song and the story.

I think the one thing that I cannot do without each day is hope. If you put me in a position where you took all my hope away, I'm not sure I could make it through the day.

If I woke up tomorrow and couldn't do music anymore, I absolutely don't know what I would do.

It reset and mended my freshly damaged and distorted view of life, and made me recognize that this thing we call music, this primal expression that we reshape and refine and define ourselves with, is the gift I was given. The ability to communicate what others feel but cannot fully express, the passing down and around of songs and stories, from Pete Townshend to Joey Ramone to me, to the audiences who take the time and effort to support our work and give us a way to support ourselves -- I'm thinking this is what I am supposed to be doing.

My main goal is to stay alive. To keep fooling myself into hanging around. To keep getting up every day. Right now I live without inspiration. I go day to day and do the work because it's all I know. I know that if I keep moving I stand a chance. I must keep myself going until I find a reason to live. I need one so bad. On the other hand maybe I don't. Maybe it's all bullshit. Nothing I knew from my old life can help me here. Most of the things that I believed turned out to be useless. Appendages from someone else's life.

From a young age, I had done a lot of theater and musical theater. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do with my life, but every time I was away from acting, I just felt very incomplete and a little stir crazy.

When I started music, I think it was responsible for keeping me sane, because training as a dancer really kept me in good spirits amid all the crazy stuff that happened when I first became popular.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

Over and over again, I'm trying to express or communicate these big and small struggles to the world, and really to myself.

Back when I taught middle school and wrote adult mysteries, my students often asked me why I wasn't writing for kids. I never had a good answer for them. It took me a long time to realize they were right.