Vanessa Carlton Quotes

I went horseback riding and got a big chunk of horse manure kicked into my face. It has a way of slapping you right back into reality.

When faced with the choice to Love or Decieve, therein lies the path to the Heroes and Thieves.

I tour with a piano, actually. Luckily I am able to hire people that deal with it completely and magically a piano appears on stage and then magically disappears when I leave.

But when you hear the complete album, it gets dark, really straight-up rock, with some really intimate moments with just me and the piano. It's not completely me because there are parts of me that aren't on that song, that are on the album.

A lot of people give in to those pressures and let others influence the process on their second albums because they want to achieve the success they had with their first again, but they don't know how to do it.

It's always times like these when I think of you and I wonder if you ever think of me.

If Mozart were around now he would write a killer rock song.

The heart of a woman will never be found in the arms of a man.

I did not stop dancing; I did take two years off to get myself together.

The women who don't feel that people think they're sexy are the ones who seem to titillate in that way, because they don't feel like they're getting that kind of approval.

I have gone from being a 21-year-old with wide eyes to a 24-year-old woman. With success comes a lot of responsibility and power.

I was very lucky to be offered a lovely piece of property to build a career on. I started building a house on it, but it wasn't necessarily a house I would want to live in. So I ripped down that house, and I worked with these great lumberjacks to build a really cool cabin - a place I want to drink whiskey in and hang out until the sun rises.

Well, I would say that music just happens with me, I'm not in the driver's seat when I am at the piano, the piano is.

Food can become such a point of anxiety - not because it's food, but just because you have anxiety. That's how eating disorders develop.

Now, performing is second nature and I love every second of it. It is a very emotional thing when I can't play a song; maybe I'm hitting on something that I don't want to deal with. All of it is so personal. It is like therapy.

You can derive everything that is healthy for yourself in the woods.

Well, I'm stubborn and wrong, but at least I know it.

Plus, there were so many pianos in my house, so I couldn't really avoid it.

I don't use sex to sell records, obviously, but I'd be lying if I said that I don't feel like I have to make an effort to look good when I go out onstage, to wear something pretty.

Writing this record let me recapture who I am. It is summed up in the title Be Not Nobody. You need to feel comfortable in your skin and do whatever you need to do for yourself, to heal or to grow.

But now - look, I have to take care of myself. I work out every day. I'm a dancer. I've always been an athlete, and I'm one of those people who start to go crazy if they don't run or do something.

Every single note on this album is there for a reason.

I am not this big celebrity, but it gets really crazy. You have to go through the nuts of blowing up, in a sense, and then figuring out how to live your life with that.

But the approach to recording this album was kind of an organized, chaotic approach where I wanted to maintain and preserve that wild abandon to creating.

And it's sad because it's like a surprise to people - almost an anomaly - when artists are actually refined and trained on an instrument. That's the last thing people think about.

My mom would give me a piece to play, but I wouldn't do any theory because when it came time to do it I would sneak back upstairs and watch TV. So, I had these kind of nonchalant lessons for years, then it just started soaking in.

I learned a lot from that first record and I learned a lot from my experiences touring, but really the biggest education I got over the past two years was learning the importance of arrangements.

I don't put boundaries on myself when I sit at the piano.