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.
NINA SIMONEI feel more alive now than I ever have in my life. I have a chance to live, as I’ve dreamed.
More Nina Simone Quotes
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If I get an idea I put it on tape and somebody else writes it out.
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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.
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I have a cultured manner of speaking.
NINA SIMONE -
I’m sorry that I did not become the world’s first black classic pianist. I think I would have been happier.
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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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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.
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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 -
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.
NINA SIMONE -
Greed has driven the world crazy. And I think I’m lucky that I have a place over here that I can call home.
NINA SIMONE -
I try to swim every damn day I can, and I’ve learned to scuba dive and snorkel.
NINA SIMONE -
I feel what they feel. And people who listen to me know that, and it makes them feel like they’re not alone.
NINA SIMONE -
You have to learn to get up from the table when love is not being served.
NINA SIMONE -
Tomorrow, I might be in a different mood and you wouldn’t recognize my voice.
NINA SIMONE -
The worst thing about that kind of prejudice is that while you feel hurt and angry and all the rest of it, it feeds you self-doubt. You start thinking, perhaps I am not good enough.
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I think if I were over there in America, protest music would be more important. But I’m not going.
NINA SIMONE -
Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
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.
NINA SIMONE -
I don’t like rap music at all. I don’t think it’s music. It’s just a beat and rapping.
NINA SIMONE -
Everything that happened to me as a child involved music. It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing.
NINA SIMONE -
It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution – real girl’s talk.
NINA SIMONE -
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.
NINA SIMONE -
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 -
Music has been a burden and a joy for as long as I can remember.
NINA SIMONE -
What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did.
NINA SIMONE -
Every day has its emotional difficulties. I miss my mother whether I’m singing her music or not.
NINA SIMONE -
How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?
NINA SIMONE