It is difficult to retain your standards with the pressure of trying to make money, which always has its rules. It’s hard to walk the tightrope of doing what you think is your best and making money at it.
NINA SIMONEI think if I were over there in America, protest music would be more important. But I’m not going.
More Nina Simone Quotes
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Music is the center of my life.
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Music is a gift and a burden I’ve had since I can remember who I was.
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It doesn’t matter to me what is going on today because my music encompasses every kind of mood that exists in human beings. That’s my stick.
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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.
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Tomorrow, I might be in a different mood and you wouldn’t recognize my voice.
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I had spent many years pursuing excellence, because that is what classical music is all about… Now it was dedicated to freedom, and that was far more important.
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I would like you to know, I am a doctor of music.
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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.
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I would like a man now who is rich, and who can give me a boat – a sailboat. I want to own it and let him pay for it. My first love is the sea and water, not music. Music is second.
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I feel more alive now than I ever have in my life. I have a chance to live, as I’ve dreamed.
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I look forward to doing my own show, not someone else’s. That’s always been my dream.
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It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution – real girl’s talk.
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We have ordered things so long in a certain way, we are numb. Nobody dares question it. This is what is wrong, symbolically, with America.
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This is the world you have made yourself, now you have to live in it.
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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.
NINA SIMONE