"Once I reached my 40s, I thought to myself that if I'm going to play live now, I need to really mean this. I can't go out and be a little bit, for one moment slovenly in my choices as a performer. I mean, these people have paid a lot of money to be here, they've been through the nightmare of getting here, starving themselves waiting for us to get on stage, so I'm going to give them what they came here for."

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I deal with the depraved, the sick, the pathetic, the disturbing and the profoundly depressed. I will try it all on. I will try on what I am and what I never want to be. And everything I wanted to be, but never can be. I can be a supermodel, or your worst nightmare. Off-stage, I just get to leave it, and nobody thinks I'm like that. This is what prevents me from being a psychopath and a sociopath, my time on stage.

— Susan Messing