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.
NINA SIMONETo be young, gifted and black!
More Nina Simone Quotes
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To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that’s not what I play. I play black classical music.
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Slavery has never been abolished from America’s way of thinking.
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How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it.
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Music is the center of my life.
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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 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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I play piano, by ear. Yes, I write songs and good ones.
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There’s no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were.
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I don’t like rap music at all. I don’t think it’s music. It’s just a beat and rapping.
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When a child is gifted, people try to help that child.
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This is the world you have made yourself, now you have to live in it.
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I’m a real rebel with a cause.
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Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
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Music has been a burden and a joy for as long as I can remember.
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It’s a good time for black people to be alive.
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You can’t be different if you look at it. Being gifted is different. I had that in my piano playing. I’m very thankful for that. I’m very aware of that. The style and what I fed is just me. I never worked at it. It just happened.
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You can’t help it. An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.
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I don’t like drug addicts and she sounds like a cat.
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Tomorrow, I might be in a different mood and you wouldn’t recognize my voice.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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I feel what they feel. And people who listen to me know that, and it makes them feel like they’re not alone.
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If I get an idea I put it on tape and somebody else writes it out.
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Everything that happened to me as a child involved music. It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing.
NINA SIMONE