Molly Shannon Quotes

Then not everything is gonna be the way you think it oughta be. It seems like everytime I try to make it right, it all comes down on me. Please say honestly you won't give up on me, and I shall believe.

You go up for hundreds, thousands of roles, and you get told no, no, no, so many times.

I remember when I was on 'Saturday Night Live' my first year, and I wasn't getting much. I was down; I was ready to quit.

Failure affects me hard.

I've been shot down so many times, I get altitude sickness just from standing up for myself.

There are several times when I walked into a room and just felt like such a sham. That's the problem with auditioning.

In L.A., you constantly go on auditions, and you're usually not what they're looking for - you get used to going back and back to the same show, and nothing happens.

Boy, there are days where I get up and say 'Where the hell did my talent go? Look at this crap that I'm producing here. This is terrible. Look, I wrote this yesterday. I hate this, I hate this.'

Don't get discouraged from all the rejection.

It's not a field, I think, for people who need to have success every day: if you can't live with a nightly sort of disaster, you should get out. I wouldn't describe myself as lacking in confidence, but I would just say that the ghosts you chase you never catch.

I devoted myself to writing for years without representation or a promise of anything. And there were times when I felt quite down about my prospects.

As an artist, it's possible to get tired of yourself.

After hundreds of auditions and nothing, you're sitting home and wondering, 'What am I doing?'

When I was younger, I was almost too afraid to admit that I wanted to be an actor.

I've been doing this career for a really long time, but there was not a lot of reason, at the time when I wrote 'Fight Song,' to believe that I should keep going.

I always knew how to cook and at one point in my career where I had done nine television pilots before Three's Company and they all failed, I just got discouraged.

Certainly I had a really terrible time with 'Emotionally Weird.' When I finished it, I thought, 'I can't write any more.'

If I had known how much I hate auditioning, I doubt I would have become an actress.

I had left the music industry at the end of 2001, after 10 years, and had spent three years writing every single day - producing two unpublished novels, one abandoned novel, and three unproduced screenplays. The word 'no' and I were on more than nodding terms. The word 'no' and I were talking about going on holiday together.

I'm an actor, and I think some of us who are drawn to this work know what it is to desperately want to be loved and validated: to be good at something and not be able to do it; to come in second on countless projects; or told that you were the first choice, but the part went to that guy who had that TV show in the '90s.

It's very important to go through periods where you sound just rotten and you know it, and you have to persevere or give up.

I didn't want to play these people any more songs and have them say that they weren't good enough. So my response was to just not be able to write anymore. I know that's not the healthiest of responses.

I ended up becoming so self-conscious that my songs stopped being about my life and started being about what people thought of my music. And that was really bad.

I never doubted that I would work, and every time I went to an audition, I went into the room with the knowledge that I was going to get the part. Ninety-nine times out of 100, I didn't.

You start at a young age, going on auditions, and you think you did a good job and expect to get that role, and you don't, and it's a letdown, a disappointment. So you tell yourself to just do the work and disconnect, because you have no control over the outcome.