Quotes from Vanessa Carlton

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

When it comes to music, we live in a very different world than everyone did in the 1960s and 1970s.

My songs are a direct route into my brain and my heart.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I had no album title, and the album is like a journey in that it's a complete body of work. It's not just a couple of catchy songs and filler, so I felt that I needed to capture the essence of the album.

Toting around a full orchestra on tour is very ambitious. I would consider doing a show now and then, like do a show at Radio City or Carnegie Hall with a full orchestra.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

But my mom was a pianist, and she taught piano out of her house. I was just so excited, being a little kid and having all these other kids come to my house twice a week. I thought it was a big party.

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