I was not reluctant to become a singer. Singing has been an activity I’ve done my whole life, without thought.
NINA SIMONETo most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that’s not what I play. I play black classical music.
More Nina Simone Quotes
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I would like you to know, I am a doctor of music.
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Tomorrow, I might be in a different mood and you wouldn’t recognize my voice.
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You don’t have to live next to me / Just give me my equality.
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My job is not done. I address my songs now to the third world. I am popular all over Asia and Africa and the Middle East, not to speak of South Africa, where I’m trying to go to see Nelson Mandela.
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Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking the new inventive phrases we make up to describe things – all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play.
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Every day has its emotional difficulties. I miss my mother whether I’m singing her music or not.
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Many times I feel different like a different person.
NINA SIMONE -
My singing, if you want to call it that is merely another medium of expression. Just an instrument I play. That’s how I see my voice.
NINA SIMONE -
My love is like the wind and wild is the wind. Give me more than one caress, satisfy my hungriness. Let the wind blow through your heart for wild is the wind.
NINA SIMONE -
To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that’s not what I play. I play black classical music.
NINA SIMONE -
I do love to sing Jacques Brel songs, intensely. I get terribly excited, just by reading a couple of lines in any one of his songs.
NINA SIMONE -
It’s time to take a look at my failures and stop calling them successes. Now I can start working at something that can use me best.
NINA SIMONE -
I demand perfection in what I do, and I practice very hard before I give a concert-sometimes three to six hours a day.
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Once I understood Bach’s music, I wanted to be a concert pianist. Bach made me dedicate my life to music, and it was that teacher who introduced me to his world.
NINA SIMONE -
If I want to take a particular form of blues somewhere else I have the equipment to do it but I never even thought of it.
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Music is the center of my life.
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I had heard blues and jazz all my life but I was never aware that it was associated with nightclubs and drinking.
NINA SIMONE -
To be young, gifted and black!
NINA SIMONE -
From the beginning, it has been a no-no for a black man to touch a white woman.
NINA SIMONE -
I think the rich will eventually have to cave in too, because the economic situation around the world is not gonna tolerate the United States being on top forever.
NINA SIMONE -
Life is short. People are not easy to know. They’re not easy to know, so if you don’t tell them how you feel, you’re not going to get anywhere, I feel.
NINA SIMONE -
What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did.
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I believe in racial memory too. I’m sure I’ve got ancient African blood in me that has something to do with what I am.
NINA SIMONE -
The allusion was that I was actually naked. I loved that. It always, kind of shocked people enough that they became mine immediately.
NINA SIMONE -
I have a cultured manner of speaking.
NINA SIMONE -
I was always a politician from the day the civil rights people chose me as their protest singer.
NINA SIMONE